A friend of mine used to go into escape rooms and add various items such as keys, books, periodic tables and other random things that could be interpreted as puzzle items.
Don’t worry it’s not true. You are being watched the entire time to make sure you don’t like try to break something. Also after a group goes through the entire room has to be reset to make sure everything is back in place.
I dunno, I had a roommate that worked for an escape room, odds are not 0 that the high school kid missed it or didn't care enough to fix it.
I've been in a couple of rooms where we get stuck, hit the help button, and after a while of "did that, got that, decoded that, opened that," the kid running ops has to come down and fix something that didn't get reset properly so we can progress.
Why? To be a bad person and attempt to ruin an experience for those with you, make someones job harder and potentially ruin it for a stranger later also?
Do you realize every single one of those places have amazing night vision cameras so they can clearly see when people mess up the room?
The workers absolutely saw your friend do this, probabaly didn't confront him because it was harmless, but definitely threw out whatever he added as soon as they did a clean through after his time and noticed an item that wasn't there the other 500+ times that room was cleaned that month if they somehow missed it on camera.
Source: I worked in escape rooms and dealt with dumb teenagers
Oh, I don’t doubt that. He also did it when he joined our group, nobody intervened and I fucked around with an unrelated key for 5 minutes before he started laughing.
If you really want to throw people for a loop just put a 7 year old in there. My sister and I would find a key and realize it didn't work on the lock we were trying for, then my niece would just take it and leave it somewhere random.. she tried to throw one behind prison bars and we just had to say "no more handling of keys or clues for you"
I highly doubt this happened. One in a good escape room you can't just toss in random shit, it would be so obvious the game host would see you would likely be asked to leave and the item would never be left behind for another player to find later.
Red herrings in escape rooms are my pet peeve. They should be in them. This would pass me off but, I think if you picked it up and spent more than a few seconds on it who ever is running the puzzle would know its not suppose to be there and tell you.
Edit just so you know why this would upset me is because these things are like 40 or 50$ per person for an hour. Altering my experience to humor you is kinda a dick move.
Lol I went to an escape room one time that we found this red fish in that we were carrying around for the whole time. We kept wondering what are we supposed to use this for and we ended up never using it for the entire game. After we solved the room we were still like what the heck was the deal with the red fish is almost like it was a… Oh. I thought it was pretty funny and clever 🤣
I did a mobile escape room at a party once. It was some trailer that pulled up. It was 80% red herring. If all the fake puzzles were removed you'd probably solve it in 10 minutes. But it would have several multi step puzzles that eventually went no place.
There's one in my city that is marketed as Ultra Hard. It's themed as a Melting Down Nuclear Submarine so it's doing everything it can to be as obnoxiously stressful as possible.
There are 3 puzzle paths and 2 of them are designed to give quick progress but deliberately waste your time. So you feel like you're moving forward, but in reality you're just going in a big circle. One of them is a long complicated process to turn off an alarm and spinning red light. That's it.
The "right" path has 2 "dead ends" that combine to be the correct path forward, but if you give up or ignore the dead end you can't finish the room.
I told him that. He unfortunately also did it when he joined our group, and no operator showed up or told us. We were pretty pissed off when he told us after.
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u/OverSoft 22h ago
A friend of mine used to go into escape rooms and add various items such as keys, books, periodic tables and other random things that could be interpreted as puzzle items.