Hourglass Escapes

"Super fun escape room for our group of 5. Puzzles were just the right level of hard. It was clean and well cared for. Steph and Willow were fun and helpful. Would highly recommend!"

"This was the first time I did an escape room experience. We did the Christmas themed room. The puzzles were fun to do with just the right degree of difficulty. We were able to solve the puzzles with time left over"

"Did the Arkham experience and it was hard to figure out but we got thru it in great time! Ethan was a fantastic spirit guide and helped us spiritually!"

"I don’t know what the disconnect is between my unpopular opinion of this escape room (negative) and the popular opinion (overwhelmingly positive), but I’ve done 10 escape rooms and Hourglass Escapes, specifically the “Rise of the Mad Pharaoh” variant, is by far the worst escape room I’ve ever experienced. I will be intentionally vague in some aspects of this review in order to maintain the integrity of the attraction. First, let’s talk about what was good about the experience. The hosts were friendly, the place was clean, and they didn’t have a “leave your cell phone in a locker” policy, which is one of my pet peeves with most escape rooms. This made the difference between me being able to participate and not, as I was on-call for work and did not have the luxury of leaving my phone behind. Thanks for treating me like an adult, seriously. Now let’s talk about what needs improvement. First and foremost, there are bugs/defects in some of the puzzles. I found it strange that not only did the hosts tell us we had unlimited hints, but they started giving us unsolicited hints without us asking. All but one of the “hints” they gave us were actually just workarounds for the errors in the escape room. The most common class of error were literal defects in their puzzle system (technology related). This was especially annoying because it kept happening over and over again in different stages of the escape room. The second main class of error was the puzzle design itself. There was a major section of the escape room that we skipped, which we weren’t even aware that we did until after we escaped and the host informed us. We were able to skip it because it was entirely unnecessary, and therefore, not properly designed. So in my opinion, the “unlimited hints” policy is a euphemism for “our escape room is problematic and we haven’t taken the time to fix it.” The occasional issue is fine and expected, but there was some kind of malfunction with every single phase of this escape room. The next massive problem is the breadth and depth of the room. This particular room requires at least 5 people to reserve. However, during the experience, we were largely bottlenecked down to 3 or 4 people because there’s simply not enough for 5 people to do. We had 6 people and during our 45 minute escape, 2-3 people in our group would periodically sit idle about half of the time just to avoid having too many cooks in the kitchen. There wasn’t even enough working space for 5 people - we’d often run out of space on desks, tables, and so on. The variety of the puzzles are easily the worst I’ve ever seen in an escape room. All of the puzzles, literally all of them, were code cracking. There were zero exploratory secrets or skill-based solutions. The immersion was also the worst I’ve ever seen. There’s a reason why they have rules for not dismantling furniture, telling you not to look on the floor, and telling you not to look above your head. No, I’m not making this up. “Clues” are mostly laminated pieces of paper that were printed on an injket. “Rare artifacts” are random items from IKEA and AliExpress. Almost nothing was hidden anywhere. You were expected to write notes on a terrible device that makes zero sense in the context of the theme, and these devices malfunctioned more than they functioned. Locks were overly simplistic combination locks that looked like kids toys, pastel colors and all. They explicitly disallowed brute forcing locks (just to be clear, I mean trying combinations, not physically breaking them) which is not only immersion breaking (there’s a reason why a rational human being would brute force these simple locks in the context of the storyline), but again signals to me that it’s a poorly designed puzzle. Frankly, the escape room was just tacky and cheap. I would not recommend this escape room to anyone, not even first timers. Maybe the other rooms at Hourglass Escapes are better, but if this one is any indication of the quality, it would be a very solid “no” from me. I’d be happy to share constructive criticism with the owners."

"A+++ I 100% recommend Hourglass Escapes! First I have to mention the people there. They were incredibly friendly and accommodating. We had an issue flying into town ( luggage didn't make it), and they did everything possible to make sure we were able to enjoy the room. Speaking of the room, we did Pirate escape, and my wife, daughter and I loved it! The puzzles were just challenging enough to make you think and work at them, but still solvable without any hints. Lots of little details and creative puzzles that made this room stand out. This was my 50th escape room and I would easily put this in my top 10. Next time I'm in town I will absolutely be trying out their other rooms which look to be just as good."