The Purge: Breakout
Positives
Negatives
Bottom Line
In short, this was a fun and scary escape room. The setup was really well done and they transformed two trailers to really feel like some creepy death house. The puzzles were logical and made sense. While they were in a chronological order to be solved there were enough pieces to each puzzle that there was enough for everyone to do. The craftsmanship could have been a bit better as there were some components that didn’t work right on the first try. The parking was also a hellish nightmare and only offered street parking in a heavily packed residential area.
Posted
March 12, 2015 by KC
Full Article
I will always have a bit of a soft spot for this room as it was the very first escape room I have ever done. However, I waited to do post this review until I was more experienced and had something to compare it to. When I arrived I was greeted by the scene of two sets of trailers parked side by side and a tent with friendly staff waiting to check us in. There were a few other groups hanging around and a few TV’s were playing the promo trailer on loop. The neighborhood the “rooms” were parked in was not the classiest part of Los Angeles, but certainly not the worst and it helped set the scene in a way.
The premise of this room is horror based and unsurprisingly in support of the movie The Purge: Anarchy. The basic plot is one night per year, the government sanctions a 12-hour period in which citizens can commit any crime they wish — including murder — without fear of punishment or imprisonment. You enter the room with this premise: It is the night of the purge and you are trapped in the home of Big Daddy, and when Daddy comes home, he is going to kill you.
Since this escape room is no longer running I can give you all of the details of my experience!
Myself and four of my soon to be closest coworkers were crammed through a trailer door and found ourselves in a floor to ceiling cage barely big enough to fit all of us. Dimly lit we could see a small hallway off to one side with a book case and a picture frame, and more importantly, in the anti-chamber right outside where the cage stood was a woman. She was shabbily dressed, disheveled and chained at the wrist and had some screwed up looking gag covering her mouth and yes she was a real, living person. All the while a loud speaker is counting down every five minutes how much of our limited time we have left until we die.
First task? Get the hell out of the cage. It took some digging around but someone found a large piece of rectangular metal, then another person found some rope. At first we thought it was some type of weight we’d have to attach to levy of some kind. We were wrong of course. At some point I decided to see if the metal was magnetic and it was! It stuck to the metal bars like white on rice. It wasn’t much of a step from there to figure out to tie the rope to the magnet and then find the set of keys on the ground out of arms reach outside of the cage. A throw, a pull and and an unlocked lock later and we were free!
At this point the chained up woman was frantic and we used the keys we had just found to unbind her and remove the freaky gag. She turned out to be the daughter of the Big Daddy character and served to help give us clues throughout the room escape. Or sometimes just be super creepy for ambiances sake. She was also probably there to make sure we weren’t being stupid and hurting ourselves or damaging the room. I feel it’s weird that she didn’t have a name so I’ll name her here as Rachel. Every demented captive should have a name.
In the hallways was a door with a key pad, a strategically torn picture hanging on the wall and a book case with a ton of jokes and books. Rachel starts chanting a Psalm and we find it in a bible on the shelf, written on the same page is a key to the door and we’re through!
Next we’re greeted by a living room area complete with 80’s styled furniture and TV playing static atop a TV stand with a lock on the lower doors. This room connects to another open room that has a kitchen with a phone, cabinets, a fridge with a lock, hell it had everything including the kitchen sink. Another door stands locked waiting for a key code on far side of the kitchen. We start finding little scraps of paper with numbers which match the format of the lock on the fridge and the mad hunt is on. We find the slips of paper everywhere. Under couch cushions, behind things, under papers and then there was the sink. They hid a goddamn piece of paper in the garbage disposal. Due to my inherent fear of getting my hand ripped to shreds I went “nope nope nope” when I realized it was down there and made my coworker do it. Once we had all the pieces of paper we unscrambled them into the word “PURGE” and used it to unlock the fridge where we found DVD and a code to unlock the TV cabinet.
The DVD played some creepy warning message and directed us to call some type of service for the house. We found a service flier on the refrigerator and then came the chore of trying to use the broke ass kitchen phone. Seriously the buttons were sticky and it took us a good five minutes to get it working right despite calling the correct number. Rachel had to jump in at one point and had to help us trouble shoot it, barely maintaining her character as she did so. But soon enough we had gotten a code from the static filled voice on the other end of the line and we were through the door into…
The bedroom! There was a bed and a safe and a key pad by the closet door. I don’t actually remember how we figured out the safe code but soon we were in and had gotten a key ring with symbols and colors on it. This is where things get a little bit fuzzy and why you should never do a review 6 months after completing a room. We managed to get through a closet door and going through a bathroom where you literally has to stick your hand in a goopy toilette to get another clue. There was a darkened hallways with a fuse box puzzle where you had to flip the switches on the correct order to turn on all the lights. A hallway with those inflated air bags they use in fun houses that you had to squeeze through.
Eventually we found ourselves in what was the last room before our escape. An office with a desk and computer and some various other furniture. It was in the room I had to crawl into a coffin sized closet to grab clue. It was also here that we got absolutely stuck. There was a piece of paper with blank spaces for letters and boxes around where certain letters would go. We thought if we could figure out the phrases and pick out the letters we could unscramble a word for a computer code. We couldn’t figure it out (It turned out the phrases were written in black light back in the room we had previously been in with the breakers and we had to use a black light flash light we had found in a safe, also there were about 3 more puzzles to go.)
We were still musing over what the hell to do when the counter hit one minute and Rachel started losing her shit and counting down out loud frantically with it. At the end a siren starts going off and she pulls us into a hidden closet and tells us Big Daddy is coming and hold the door closed or he’ll kill us.
So there I am. Holding the door closed with one of my coworkers, while the other two are holding onto for death life while sirens and flashing lights go off and we’re screaming and freaking out. And then a door opens at the other end of the closet and some dude is standing there and goes “You lost, game over. Get out.” It. Was. Hilarious.
In short, this was a fun and scary escape room. The setup was really well done and they transformed two trailers to really feel like some creepy death house. The puzzles were logical and made sense. While they were in a chronological order to be solved there were enough pieces to each puzzle that there was enough for everyone to do. The craftsmanship could have been a bit better as there were some components that didn’t work right on the first try. The parking was also a hellish nightmare and only offered street parking in a heavily packed residential area.
Puzzle Types: WARNING POTENTIAL SPOILERS highlight the text in the black box below to view.
Lock and Key, Combination Locks, Hidden Objects, Picture Jigsaws, Video, Black Light Messages, Word Scrambles, Pattern Recognition
