Chernobyl

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Escape Room Games’ newest escape room, Chernobyl, is located in a very accessible location in Universal City, right off the 101 freeway. Haunted Record Studio shares the same building as Chernobyl. While they have their own parking lot, it is best to carpool since parking is very limited. It’s wise to leave any personal belongings in your car since there’s no locker to store your items. Don’t worry, the escape room is located in a pretty safe looking commercial area. There’s one unisex bathroom and a water cooler. The waiting area has a nice couch to sit in, but there’s no leaderboard to set any goals to work towards. In addition, there are no puzzles to warm up to. There are, however, two pay-to-play VR games on each side of the room.

The website has a very themed design, but a rather lengthy backstory about the Chernobyl event and the room. There were some spelling errors so an introductory video might’ve worked better. The escape room itself is set at a very low temperature, so it definitely has a feel of a malfunctioning nuclear power plant in Russia. In the first room, we were stuck for awhile because there were lockboxes with a 3-digit combo that appear to be part of the game. We found out later that they weren’t part of the game, nor should we have interacted with them. This made the game play confusing and frustrating.

Without giving up too much, there’s a strong play on colors. If you have problem visualizing color, be sure to bring a friend who can tell the slight differences between a light and slightly darker color. There is at least one puzzle that had very low light, so a little flashlight would’ve been useful since this escape room is heavily reliant on color. The room also had a lot of red herrings and a limited number of puzzles. On average, there were only one or two puzzles per room. There are a total of five distinct rooms so we suggest a group of no more than four people. We brought six and at times some of us were standing around while the puzzles were being solved. One of the confusing parts of this escape room is that we were unsure if we unlocked a door since there was no sound or noise to indicate whether we solved the puzzle successfully.

While sometimes we didn’t feel like we were actually in the bunker of the Chernobyl power plant, the room works hard on trying to create a theme (like using real video footage of Chernobyl), but many items served no purpose so they felt like red herrings. The puzzles themselves are not intuitive, but definitely very theme-related. At times, we were certain we were on the right track, but we had to verify with the Game Master. Good thing is that there are five clues or we definitely would not have escaped. The rooms are very electronic-heavy. There were times that the puzzle malfunctioned due to a loose connection.

Last but not least, the customer service and post-game experience were definitely above average. Our photo was taken with a professional camera. There was a brief walkthrough by the Game Masters to ensure we understood each of the puzzles. This room has the potential of being a really great escape room but definitely more work is needed.