The Senators Office

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Escape Strategy is located in the Chicago suburb of Aurora, Illinois.  There was plenty of parking available at the location, and they had a large colorful sign above the door.  Upon entering the building, we saw several areas of sit, water and other drinks available to purchase, merchandise to purchase, and a few puzzles to play with while waiting to start a room.  The employees checked us in and then briefed us on our adventure.

The first room we did was The Senator’s Office.  Our goal was to find evidence of espionage in our boss, the Senator’s, office.  We entered the room and it did look like a typical office setting, and had some nods to the individual being a Senator or involved in government.  Unfortunately, once we started playing we quickly realized we felt like we were in an escape room.  What we mean by that is we did not feel immersed, the story got lost, and we felt like we were just connecting ideas to open locks without much of a reason.  This room is lower tech, but the puzzle design was also basic compared to other rooms in this area.  We did enjoy the puzzles that were connected to the theme, and we appreciated the thought that went into those.

While we did not need any hints in this room, we were told that in order to get clues at this location your entire group needs to do the chicken dance.  The employees do monitor you and have both video and audio, so the thought of doing the chicken dance made our group think that immersion would be detrimentally impacted if we all needed to stop “finding evidence” to do a dance into a camera.

In terms of puzzle design, as we’ve said, it’s a pretty basic escape room.  Math, reading, connecting clues that are given to you, nothing really of note to mention. If you like reading, this room is for you! There were many laminated pages to read throughout this room, which did give some backstory and indication of what we were doing, but felt almost tiring after a while.  There were also multiple puzzles of different types for our team to be working on at once, which we appreciated.

Overall, we found this room to be a reading-heavy, low-tech escape room.  While we didn’t dislike this escape room, nothing really stuck out for us either.  As a group, we typically laugh and dance, and enjoy our time in a room—in this room, we didn’t feel like that excitement.  We do think this room would be best for beginner players who don’t necessarily know the gist of an escape room, for groups with primarily kids, and for small groups.