Rise of Ra

It’s difficult to talk about certain rooms when there’s a common theme we’ve seen and done before, as there’d be a lot of comparisons. The Rise of Ra room (being another Egyptian themed room) is one of those, and considering we had done a few of those somewhat recently, there’s a lot to compare. The room itself is pretty well laid out and some original painting on the wall as opposed to wall decals or panelling and was actually fairly decent. Like a few of the other Egypt rooms, sand is incorporated on the floor, albeit a little sparse in areas. The puzzles in the room were all sensor based, where there were no traditional locks and everything was solved by putting the right thing in the right spot for most of it. While it’s neat, and adds to immersion, it also lead to some setbacks for us when it came to how precise we had to be in some parts, having gotten the correct placement on a puzzle, and nothing happening and then trying something new. The room also had a new type of hint system with an ipad by the front door, where you can select the puzzle you’re at and a low, med, or high difficulty clue/hint as how to progress. While interesting, it takes away from actual clarification as well it lays out how many puzzles are in the room and the order in which they would be solved. While we got out, it felt a bit anticlimactic and sits in the middle for not the best, but not the worst, of Egyptian themed rooms for us. As well as being one of their newer rooms, the price point is $5 more than their oldest rooms.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve been back to Level 1 Escape but my expectations were quite high for this room. Sadly I don’t think this room exactly measured up. The decor was great and one of the better decorated rooms in terms of Egypt themes. The decor was about the only thing good about this room however. There were some great ideas for puzzles here but some of them weren’t executed well eg. faulty sensors. Their new hint system also isn’t my favorite. There is now an iPad at the beginning of the room from where you get your hints and it displays each puzzle as a picture on the screen which kind of reveals the progression of the room and spoils it. From there, you select your puzzle you’re working on and you can select an “easy, medium or hard” which will reveal a different amount of information depending on what you pick. I found that for one puzzle in particular, even though we ended up using the “easy” level hint, we still were unable to figure out how it worked as the clue still was not specific enough. This system does not allow you to ask staff for a hint or clarification either. In our case, we had the correct solution for one puzzle but the sensor wasn’t working, but we were not able to call and ask about this which caused us to spend a frustratingly long amount of time trying other solutions that were incorrect. Luckily the staff noticed us on the camera and eventually ran in themselves to tell us that we had had it quite a while ago and with some more fidgeting, was able to get the sensors we needed to work. I left this room feeling a little underwhelmed because of all of these little issues. This room isn’t horrible by any means, but it left me missing the excitement I had felt after playing their first four rooms.