Cabaret Voltaire

Currently the only room at A/Maze, it’s quite a show! The place was both easy and not easy to find, as the address is correct but there’s not outdoor signage to find the place. A recent article in the Metro revealed the building was an old tobacco factory, and using the old building and it’s left over parts and pieces inside really added to the immersion for their theme here. It’s the first time we’ve encountered a room where it begins… outside of the room! The immediate plan is to find access into the room (hopefully you wouldn’t need a clue before that!) and then make your way through. The puzzles are all fairly timed with an early 1900’s setting, aside from the few tech aspects, it fits in well with the environment. The hint system is pretty innovative here as well, not where we haven’t seen it before, but in how they executed it was really unique. We had a lot of time after our room to chat with our gamemaster (one of the owners) about the room, other rooms and aspects of the room that were still being worked on. Definitely feels like a room focused on delivering an experience rather than just jumping on the bandwagon. Despite having a location in Montreal, this location seems to just have the franchise of the name and developed everything on their own. Looking forward to what they have in store next!

This location was a little tricky to find them as there wasn’t really any street signage (yet?), and they are in the basement of an older building downtown. The lobby is very unfinished but you can tell that there is potential. They have lockers (but no locks on them yet) however they are extremely narrow (my large bag would definitely not fit inside of one). Since there is only one room at the moment, and there were no bookings after us, the owner just locked the door and I left my bag on the counter.Now this room had a bit of a different feel right from the beginning, rather than being brought to a door and let in, you are lead down a hallway and told “you can start right around that corner”. You can tell a lot of effort was put into set design, and the majority of the items in the room fit with the time period. A few items had a very ‘homemade’ feel and could maybe be dressed up a little more, but overall all the pieces worked well. Before we started, our game master gave us a quick rundown of a few items that weren’t working, or might be missing signage, so I was concerned that the game might feel a bit pieced together, however it didn’t feel unfinished and I was pleasantly surprised. This escape room was designed entirely by the owners of the location, and you can tell they put a lot of effort into it. Overall it was a great experience and I would highly recommend.

I had seen a lot of ads for this room on Facebook and the like and was pretty excited to finally get down to try it. Entering into the building was mildly creepy as it’s an older building and located in the lower level. They used a lot of the elements of the original building in the waiting room and the room itself and upped the immersiveness for sure. You really did feel like you were entering into an old school speakeasy down a back alley, and you kind of are as it was an old tobacco storage building I believe. The puzzles were all unique, and very few of them involved locks. There were unique uses of some standard escape room tech here which made us really have to think at some points. Some of the puzzles still need some kinks worked out however as they required the game master to enter into the room multiple times to fix them. The other aspect of this room that I enjoyed was this hint system. It was really well integrated into the room in the form of a TV in a picture frame. If it wasn’t for those few technical difficulties that really took you out of the experience, this room would be top notch.