PanIQ Entertainment: Insane Asylum
Positives
Negatives
Bottom Line
A gritty room that makes you feel as if you really have been trapped in an abandoned Insane Asylum. Worth checking out if you’ve already done PanIQ’s other room, “The Bunker. ”
Posted
December 28, 2015 by KC
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For the holidays my family and I decided that there was no better way to celebrate than to be locked in an Insane Asylum. After all being with the relatives for the whole week often feels that way anyway. Just kidding, love you mom and dad! Anyways, we headed over to PanIQ Entertainment in Hollywood to another escape room.
The room story for the Insane Asylum is as follows:
“You are a part of a medical team whose job is to solve the mystery of a patient who was locked into a mental hospital 70 years ago.”
That’s about as deep as the story goes and honestly as we were solving the room I didn’t notice any cohesive story or mystery. It was mostly just solve one thing to open the next thing and eventually escape. Which is fine, but it was lacking a little in build up.
When we first entered the asylum it was CRAZY dark. Your eyes do adjust with time and there’s some tools a few things you can do to help make it less dark. I’d still advise against bringing along anyone with poor night vision. If you can see OK or at least reasonably well in the dark, you’ll be fine. Also, while dimly lit and kind of dirty feeling this room is suspenseful but not scary. Nothing jumps out at you or startles you, there’s just a creepy ambiance and it definitely feels like you’re in an abandoned insane asylum.
I don’t think this is a huge spoiler, as a lot of rooms do these, but I absolutely hate red herrings and this room had a few. For those not in the know, red herrings are items in the room that have zero purpose. They’re meant to be a distraction make the players burn time trying to figure out what they’re used for. Room designers will often put them in to make the room harder. I’m of the opinion that if a room needs to be harder they should add in a few more puzzles or make puzzles you have more difficult to solve. Red herrings seem like a low blow and a cheap way of “fixing” a room.
For the puzzles that weren’t red herrings they were logical and pretty fun. There’s a ton of looking for stuff in the room and my biggest advice is to really look at the things you find. We burned a lot of time on a puzzle because there was a clue on an item we hadn’t closely examined. If you’ve done a few escape rooms there’s probably nothing new puzzle wise you haven’t seen before but I definitely give PanIQ Entertainment credit for keeping almost all of their puzzles well engrained in the Insane Asylum theme.
I far preferred PanIQ Entertainment’s “The Bunker” to this room, but it’s still worth a go if you’re in the area. We escaped with 4m 37s to go and I think we could have done it quicker if we’d known ahead of time that there were red herrings.
Learn more about the Insane Asylum and other rooms by PanIQ Entertainment: paniqentertainment.com/hollywood
Puzzle Types: WARNING POTENTIAL SPOILERS highlight the text in the black box below to view.
Lock and Key, Combination Locks, Hidden Objects, Mazes, Word Puzzles
