William Castle – retired

First, it was hard to find the place as there was no real signage indicating where this place was. Reflecting upon the address I deduced it was on the 2nd floor of the building where the address was but all three of the entrances were locked and we had to call them. We also had to wait for quite a while for the room to be reset. Staff seemed unattentive and non-responsive for a lot of the time we were waiting. The room caught me by surprise as I thought the wallpaper was real for a little bit there. The puzzles were neat if not a bit random. Similar to another room, a clue was in Roman numerals and the help was that another object in the room contained it as well in a numerical order to help you out. There’s a lot of fancy things in the room(s) that almost seem too much for the theme that’s set for it. There’s one puzzle in particular that was kinda neat, being the second time I’ve seen it done, but felt a bit out of place. A lack of a light source in the 2nd half left us using a black light to help us see and read things. What turned out to be a prop left us spending a lot of time fiddling with it as an interactive object. While we got out, it felt a little anti-climatic like, “Oh, we’re out? Cool.”

This was the first room we tried with this new company, and we were there on their opening day. Unfortunately, besides the first employee who greeted us, we found the rest of the staff (there was at least five others that day) to be very stand-offish and generally unwelcoming. It didn’t make a great first impression on us to say the least. The room itself was also lacklustre. The décor wasn’t bad, with antique appearing furniture and wallpaper to give the impression you were in a dark castle. Our only issue was the darkness. It was REALLY dark, like to the point it was very difficult to read out some of the clues. There was a decent use of technology in this room with some cool puzzles we had never seen before which was refreshing. However, we found this room to be extremely short and by the end we left feeling unsatisfied with the experience. They do offer pictures at the end, but on a Polaroid camera with no copy for your group to take home so you must take a picture of a picture if you want a memento. Between the room itself and the not so great feelings we got from the staff I’m not super excited to try the rest of their rooms.