Baby's First Escape Room

So Suveera got to experience her first escape room this weekend in Gatlinburg. Shaila and I try and do an escape room every time we travel, and we didn't want Suveera to be the reason we missed one.

One of our favorite escape room companies, The Escape Game, had two locations in the Smoky Mountains area. We've gone so far as to plan a trip to Nashville, where they're headquartered, just to do a bunch of rooms we hadn't yet. Luckily, the Gatlinburg location had one of the two rooms they've put out since that trip, so we knew we had to do it.

Eventually I’d like to build out a more rigid framework for writing escape room reviews, but for now I’ll do the best I can a bit loose.

The game is called "Timeliner", and the theme as you might guess is a train that travels through time. Like all of the rooms at The Escape Game, the design of the room was amazing. Very immersive, with a great combination of little details you know you can ignore and larger set pieces that will be used for clues. The immersion was never broken either. The train itself used digital windows to help provide clues which was interesting but also felt like a bit of a cop-out, but that’s my only real complaint.

Overall the puzzles were pretty easy, but that was fine for us on our first trip with Suveera. Most were pretty straight forward and while somewhat easy to figure out, you still felt like you accomplished something when you did. There was one dexterity puzzle, but it went pretty smoothly even with a baby strapped to me. We asked for 2 clues, but the first time was because a set piece wasn’t working correctly. We had the code correct, but a door wasn’t opening. They progressed us remotely and gave us back some time. The second hint was for what turned out to be the last puzzle. We had arrived late because of traffic, so they actually docked us 16min from the start and we were down to ~8 min left, so we thought we needed to rush. If we had known we had time, we probably would have figured it out ourselves.

I think this is a very important metric for a room because it also informs the group sizes that feel comfortable. This room was pretty linear, I feel like only a few of the final puzzles could be solved out of order. That was ok with just the two of us, but I feel like with more people there would be a lot of spinning wheels.

Overall, it was a very fun room. I think it was perfect for the two of us, especially while carrying Suveera with us. We managed to escape with 26:27 remaining, at least if you add back the 16 minutes we were docked for being late. It was a little quick, but it really did feel good the whole way through.

Now there's just one new game from The Escape Game for us to do, but who knows when we'll be able to get that one done. For now we know Suveera at least doesn't hate the experience, so we're going to keep bringing her along for the ride.