Top Escape Rooms

January 25, 2023 6:48 AM

The Top Escape Rooms Project (TERPECA) has announced its 2022 list of the world's best escape rooms. Or, at least, the world's best games that are playable in English. Language requirement notwithstanding, TERPECA's top games are mostly in continental Europe, with the number one slot going to Greece's Chapel & Catacombs, a mix of horror maze, escape room, and interactive theatre. At #14, the US makes its first appearance with Houston's Houdini-themed The Man From Beyond, another theater/escape room hybrid. The UK just scrapes into the top 50, with Macclesfield's Mr. Copplestones' Curiousity Shop coming in at #47.

TERPECA voters must have at least 200 escape rooms under their belt. If you're not quite that experienced and you want some tips on successfully escaping, Mark Rober is here for you.

In other escape room news, Universal Studios is bringing theme-park level design skills to its Back To The Future and Jurassic Park escape rooms-- but the results aren't exactly traditional escape rooms.


Previously on Metafilter:
Escape Room Owners Solve The Pandemic Puzzle; AI Escape rooms; In A Chaotic World, Escape Rooms Make Sense; Letmeout;
We Now Have A Zero Percent Escape Rate With Criminals

posted by yankeefog (25 comments total)

I am not normally a fan of "team building" exercises, or anything that smacks of mandated fun, but one of the best working experiences I've had on any team was when we did an escape room together. This was in the beforetimes, of course, but it was fantastic.

I'm about 90% convinced that we should replace job interviews, particularly for managers' roles, with an escape room, an hour of Overcooked and a round Forbidden Desert; you'll know everything you need to know about somebody by the end of that.
posted by mhoye at 7:14 AM on January 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Keep in mind that some people do not do well in situations where they lack any amount of bodily autonomy. So, I am against using situations like escape rooms as a form of testing competence in performing any kind of job that is not, you know, being trapped in a room.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:59 AM on January 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

As a voter for the Terpeca, I'm happy to see it appear here on the blue. The team behind it puts in a lot of effort to try to make a helpful list of the top 100 games for English speakers. Review sites, such as Yelp, are almost unusable when it comes to determining the quality of an escape room.

Escape rooms are incredibly variable in quality and it's very frustrating to think you're going to see an epic space and it turns out to be an office with posters on the wall and a handful of boxes locked by 4 digit combo locks.
posted by GeminiSkunk at 7:59 AM on January 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

So, I am against using situations like escape rooms as a form of testing competence in performing any kind of job that is not, you know, being trapped in a room.

I think mhoye was joking, but, just so you know, no one is actually trapped in an escape room.

Escape rooms are incredibly variable in quality and it's very frustrating to think you're going to see an epic space and it turns out to be an office with posters on the wall and a handful of boxes locked by 4 digit combo locks.

Yeah, the 4-digit combo locks are a plague on the genre. We just played a game with decent atmosphere, but the puzzles were 80% find-the-combo, find-the-combo, find-the-combo, and it did start to drag.
posted by praemunire at 8:13 AM on January 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh, and I meant to include: Room Escape Artist has decent reviews but is a little more U.S.-focused.
posted by praemunire at 8:15 AM on January 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Keep in mind that some people do not do well in situations where they lack any amount of bodily autonomy.

Sure, but ideal for jobs where you will be cubicle based.
posted by biffa at 8:53 AM on January 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is very timely as my family and I are doing an escape room this Sunday. It will be my first physical room (I've done quite a few as apps. The theme is Pirates--arrrrgggh! I'm looking forward to it!
posted by agatha_magatha at 9:21 AM on January 25, 2023

I live in London and there are a lot of great rooms here, so I was surprised none of them made the top 100. Or even the top 200-- the highest rated London game is #241, Cluequest'sOrigenes. I haven't done that one but I've done two other Cluequest rooms and they were very well done.

I also loved The Game Is Now, which had exceptionally good production values-- it really felt like I was in an episode of BBC's Sherlock.
posted by yankeefog at 9:24 AM on January 25, 2023

This is very timely as my family and I are doing an escape room this Sunday. It will be my first physical room (I've done quite a few as apps. The theme is Pirates--arrrrgggh! I'm looking forward to it!

Have a great time! And do watch the Mark Rober video I linked to-- I found it very helpful. The only tip in that video that my family hasn't found useful in our escape rooming is, "Have one person act as a project manager, who doesn't solve puzzles but just tracks what everybody else is doing." I can see that being really helpful with an 8-person team. But with just the four of us, we've found better for everybody to work on puzzles, while announcing out loud the things they're working on.
posted by yankeefog at 9:27 AM on January 25, 2023

Oh! I'm one of the owners/designers/etc of #41 on this list, as well as a voter and a nominator, and decades-long friend with the founder. Now that my biases are disclosed, I'm going to say a bunch of good things about TERPECA:

First of all, it's not run by some industry consortium or something, it's an hobby project, founded by an enthusiast, Rich Bragg, who's played a ton of escape rooms (now over 1100), and run by volunteers. I think the project's goals are basically:

• Recognize the games that they love, and encourage companies to make better and better games
• Have good answers when someone says "hey you like escape rooms, which ones should I play?"
• Satisfy Rich's penchant for numbers, statistics, and metrics

It's hard for me to imagine a more rigorous process, and I am 100% certain that if Rich could imagine a more rigorous process, he would already be doing it. The website talks a fair amount about their process, but in addition to mathematical rigor, they also make a ton of effort made to ferret out conflicts of interest and bad actors gaming the system. A good number of the top rooms are made and/or operated by enthusiasts (from a business point of view, making three pretty good rooms will usually be easier, cheaper, and more profitable than making one really good room), so this is baked into the process pretty deeply. And the large number of voters is a direct result of their efforts to grow the projects to make it more robust against bias, tampering, and just statistical noise.

Keep in mind that some people do not do well in situations where they lack any amount of bodily autonomy.

I think mhoye was joking, but, just so you know, no one is actually trapped in an escape room.

This varies by region and by room! In the Netherlands, pretty much every game locks you in and then has a big emergency exit button you can press to get out. IMO it's distracting and they have to explain it to every single team, and even our group of seasoned enthusiasts came really close to pressing it by accident a couple times, so IMO it's worse than just "pretend the door is locked". The owners there I talked to told me people will give them bad reviews if they don't actually lock folks in. 🤷 It varies more in the US. There are still some games that handcuff you to a wall behind three layers of locked doors (not just an autonomy issue, but also a big safety problem IMO), but plenty that do it like we do - in our game, we don't even pretend to lock players in - you're going in there to do a mission, and if you want to step out to use the restroom or take a call, no problem, just know the clock is still running.
posted by aubilenon at 10:26 AM on January 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

Anne Helen Peterson had an interview with an escape room designer recently.
posted by ellieBOA at 10:29 AM on January 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

In the Netherlands, pretty much every game locks you in and then has a big emergency exit button you can press to get out.

I'm amazed that stands up to European fire codes!
posted by praemunire at 10:59 AM on January 25, 2023

TIL (many) escape rooms don't lock you in. I haven't had the opportunity to participate in this activity and had assumed that there was a locked door and an unlocked emergency exit. I had no idea a room where the "lock" was a timer alone was even a possibility, and I'm much more interested in trying an escape room as a result. Thanks, aubilenon!!
posted by epj at 1:03 PM on January 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Anne Helen Peterson had an interview with an escape room designer recently.

Not just any escape room designer -- one of the designers of The Man from Beyond which TERPECA ranked as the best escape room in the US, and the 14th best room in the world.

Anyway, that was a really interesting interview-- not just about escape rooms, but about interactive theater and creative industries in general. I loved this excerpt:

That's what you want — for the industry to get better. You want the whole industry to implement the things that you found the most effective. We view each other as “co-peters.” That's kind of what I call it. I don't know if there's a better term, but we're not competitors. We are cooperating together. Better escape rooms in my home market of Houston or anywhere else in the world is better for my business, because you can only play escape room once.

It's not a zero sum game, like a lot of businesses.

No, it's not absolutely not. The better the games in my local market, the more audience I'm going to get to come and see what I do. If you choose a game that isn’t very good as your first time, then you think oh, this is what all games must be like! Escape rooms are not for me. We don't want that, so the industry is very supportive of each other.

Also, everybody is really excited! People come to the industry with different specializations. Sometimes people are coming from the Haunted House industry, so they do really creepy set build and maybe some animatronics. Then you have people who are coming more from the puzzle world where they invest in very clever puzzles and mechanisms. There's people coming in from engineering, and there's a lot of tech involved in these games. It takes a lot of software to make it all work. I often step back and think, this is such an explosion of pent-up creativity! Humans are fundamentally creative, and because of the priorities of the market, they don't have the opportunity to make profit off of creativity.

posted by yankeefog at 1:53 PM on January 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

I had no idea a room where the "lock" was a timer alone was even a possibility, and I'm much more interested in trying an escape room as a result

Yeah the term "escape room" isn't a great fit for a lot of these games (including our own), and is further worsened by all the horror movies named "Escape Room". ("No, no, no, we try really hard not to kill you!")

Before we opened we spent plenty of time* discussing whether we should call it a quest room or something but decided that then we'd be taking on the project of explaining what it is to both people and search engines.

* my business partners are not on metafilter, but we are all bean-plate overthinkers.
posted by aubilenon at 1:56 PM on January 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've played probably ten or eleven escape rooms, here and in Canada, and I've never once been actually locked in. Though it sounds cool, I'm not sure I'd agree to such a thing. Tragic fires can develop in a very very short period of time.
posted by praemunire at 6:49 PM on January 25, 2023

It's not a zero sum game, like a lot of businesses.

No, it's not absolutely not.

Right, because you usually only play a room once, and any business is going to have no more than 4 or 5 room, and turnover is slow, so if you want to keep people interested in the form rather than relying on one-off players, you need a bunch of good-quality competitors who will keep the love alive.
posted by praemunire at 6:52 PM on January 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

I love escape rooms. Our family has done a bunch of them, and so far we have a 100% track record of getting out, though we haven’t done any that were rated as maximum difficulty. And we only do them with our own family because we’re snobs and don’t trust strangers to solve puzzles as well as we do, which I’m sure is nonsense. But it’s enough times now that I suspect that almost everyone gets out, especially since the places I’ve gone to have given a lot of extra hints in the last few minutes (which we often didn’t need). I’d love to know that that’s not true and that people often don’t make it out, but then why would people come back? It’s a much more successful business plan to make people feel smarter than everyone else, I assume.

Is there a place to see the rooms that ranked below 100? Nothing made the list here in NYC, which isn’t that surprising since we’re so short on space and rent is so high, but I’d still love to know the best-ranked games there are here and in the cities I spend the most time in.

My worst escape room experience - and I’m not including this in my ‘doesn’t almost every group escape’ query - was when my son was invited to a friend’s birthday party at a venue, and the parents didn’t know what an escape room was. So they hadn’t arranged any supervision. I offered to help with one room, and was put in charge of six hyperactive 9-10 year old boys, almost all of whom had never been in an escape room before, in a room meant for adults because “they’re smart kids,” in a venue whose method of communication with the staff was a walkie-talkie tuned to a specific channel. Complete bedlam. Especially since about ten minutes in, one of the kids grabbed the walkie-talkie from me (after I mistakenly told them repeatedly that that was the one thing I needed to be in charge of), and changed the channel, so we weren’t able to communicate with anyone moving forward. It was one of those games where two groups start in separate rooms and then meet in the middle room once they figure out how to escape the first stage. No one got to the middle.

The birthday cake was good, though.
posted by Mchelly at 9:01 AM on January 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love escape rooms and wish I could do more of them, but not a lot of places welcome soloists and I don't know enough people who'd be willing to join me!
posted by creatrixtiara at 9:12 PM on January 26, 2023

I love escape rooms and wish I could do more of them, but not a lot of places welcome soloists and I don't know enough people who'd be willing to join me!

Yeah, it's hard to make a game that is fun for 5 people but also doable by 1 person, and it's hard to make it cheap enough to be reasonable for one person while also not losing money on them. So clearly the only reasonable solution is to make a bunch of new escape room friends!
posted by aubilenon at 9:53 PM on January 26, 2023

aubilenon: The first escape room I went to allowed anyone to sign up for a slot, which ended up usually with multiple groups of people playing together (as well as soloists like me). It was great fun and I wished more places had that arrangement! I don't need to play solo, that's a lot, I just want to be able to play with others without needing to assemble my own group.
posted by creatrixtiara at 10:11 PM on January 26, 2023

Is there a place to see the rooms that ranked below 100? Nothing made the list here in NYC, which isn’t that surprising since we’re so short on space and rent is so high, but I’d still love to know the best-ranked games there are here and in the cities I spend the most time in.

Yes! You have two options.

All 333 rooms that made it to Round 2 were ranked on this complete list. That includes #304 Playground, which is part of a franchise that includes an NYC branch. (I love the idea of "You've got to get out of your classroom before summer break starts" as a theme for an escape room.) At the same franchised NYC location is #327 Special Ops: Mysterious Market.

If you want to go beyond that, you can check out all 929 rooms that got at least one nomination. After all, even a single nomination means that somebody who has played over 200 escape rooms thinks it's one of the 15 best rooms in the world. A search for "New York City" reveals a couple of additional NYC possibilities.
posted by yankeefog at 3:40 AM on January 27, 2023

Yankeefog, thanks! I’ll check out the list. We actually played both of the ones that you listed and enjoyed them. We did Mystic Market last year for my son’s bar mitzvah gift, and when they found out we were booking the room for a special occasion, they asked us what he liked and added some things to our game to give it a Zelda theme (the music was all from the game, hidden rupees to find in the marketplace that he got to keep). I definitely recommend that franchise even if they’re not top 200 ranked.
posted by Mchelly at 4:45 AM on January 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I hear ya on the lack of group thing: I had a group for escape rooms but I think that petered out thanks to pandemic. I wanted to try one of those online escape rooms, but again, had no group.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:41 AM on January 27, 2023

Creatrixtiara and Jenfullmoon, you might try searching for "escape room enthuasiasts [YOUR LOCALITY]'."

On an upcoming business trip, I'm going to be passing through a city with one of TERPECA's top fifty rooms. I don't have any friends there who like escape rooms, but I found a Facebook group for local enthusiasts and I've managed to connect with two other people who want to do the room with me.

It's definitely more of a hassle than just booking to join a pre-existing group, but it might be an option worth pursuing.

(Speaking of which, if any MeFites in the Boston area want to meet up in the middle of a weekday to do an escape room, message me...)
posted by yankeefog at 9:22 AM on January 27, 2023 [2 favorites]