12 rooms in Texas and Louisiana
An escape room trip report
My family consists of four escape room enthusiasts. We haven’t done hundreds of rooms, but we have done dozens, and we love the experience and that it’s something we can share. The group is: me (middle aged male in tech), Kid1 (senior in high school), Kid2 (sophomore in high school), and Spouse (who values privacy :) ). We’ve done escape rooms on trips, but never before done a trip for escape rooms. Would this be fun, or would we all hate each other by the end?
The plan, which (spoiler) very much did not survive contact with the enemy: start in Houston, which has by some accounts the best room in the country, then to Baton Rouge for the excellent rooms at 13th Gate, over to New Orleans to visit Clue Carré and hang out for the new year, then to Orlando for a few rooms in the rough area, then home to the SF Bay Area.
Houston got off to a great start. Our flight was only a little late, and after dinner we headed to The Man From Beyond. We have hardly done any rooms with actors in the room with you, and what made this room special was the outstanding (and attractive, according to Kid1) actors. The room itself was well done with satisfying puzzles and a very strong carry-through theme of magic, both the stage kind and the more mystic (or fraudulent, depending on your point of view) seance type. It is definitely not the hardest room we’ve done, and it’s essentially just one room, so while the pacing was great and the reveals were fun, it felt less exploratory and discovery oriented than some of our favorites. Overall a fantastic experience and well worth the trip.
The next day we went to Truth Barbecue, supposedly one of the best Texas BBQ joints in Houston. We got there right when it opened, but this being two days after Christmas, we weren’t the only people to think of it. The food was very good, but probably not worth what turned out to be a 90 minute wait in line. Kid1 objected once we saw the line, and then felt fully justified with the “I told you so” when it really did take a long time.
That day’s room was Wizard at Escape Again Rooms in Sugar Land, which is evidently a town next to or within Houston. (There seem to be a lot of little towns nestled within Houston.)
Wizard was very good. Lots of puzzles across four rooms, and they put thought into the theming and room decoration and design. Much of the decor was made of foam which showed wear and felt a little flimsy, but the room more than made up for it with the quality and quantity of puzzles. We ended up needing a hint due to overlooking the obvious, and needing help due to a technology failure. There was a story that carried through, and lots of content. Top notch experience despite some hiccups.
The next day we flew to Baton Rouge, and that afternoon did Cutthroat Cavern at 13th Gate.
Wow, just… wow. The most impressive room we’ve done, hands down. The reveal of the cavern itself is the most jaw dropping thing I’ve seen in an escape room, and probably the most impressive thing I’ll ever see in one.
We did need a certain amount of help with this room. We’re pretty solid at solving puzzles, but garbage at finding things, and there were a lot of hidden things to find in this room. Somehow no amount of reminding ourselves to look under things and move things around and check behind ever is enough. Weirdly, Spouse is incredibly good at finding things in real life, but while she’s still the best at finding things in rooms, it’s often not enough. Without her, though, we would be lost. (foreshadowing)
Great room, great experience. I thought it was the best room we did. The kids thought it had the best set design but thought the experience was better in both the Houston rooms. Those three were the best according to all of us.
That evening, Kid1 started to feel unwell, then felt progressively worse, until they had what was either food poisoning or norovirus. The poor kid spent the night in the bathroom, more or less.
The next day, the plan was to do two rooms at 13th Gate (Spellbound and Tomb of Anubis), and then drive to New Orleans. We debated whether it was ethical to put someone in a room who might have noro, concluded that maybe it was ok with extensive handwashing, masking, and not touching faces, but it became clear that Kid1 was still somewhat sick and couldn’t do it. And unfortunately for the rest of us, the rooms had a 4 person minimum, so we ended up missing both. Too bad – the game runner told us Spellbound was her favorite, and Tomb of Anubis was highly rated on Terpeca, so we were looking forward to them.
We did manage to make our way to New Orleans, and Kid1 was feeling better and able to keep food down by the end of the day. Seemed like a 24 hr bug, and hopefully our illness woes were behind us.
Narrator: they were not.
In New Orleans the next morning, Kid1 who was feeling better went with me to the WWII museum, and managed to keep lunch down. The museum was great, I learned some things despite being knowledgeable, and the overall presentation was extremely well done. I especially liked the Pacific theater displays. There’s a lot to see, much more than we could do in a few hours, so we didn’t push it and left when we felt like it.
That afternoon was the Voodoo Cemetery at Clue Carré New Orleans. (They have two locations, about which more in a bit.)
Voodoo Cemetery was three small rooms crammed with puzzles and a loose story, which really was a frame and some ambiance more than anything that could be called a narrative. We got stuck in the first room due to overlooking the obvious again – pro tip: if there is a bag of items to help you, actually look at each of them carefully rather than assuming you know what they all are. And we also had a technology failure.
The set design was great, it really felt like you were in a spooky grave, not like a random room in a storefront, and they used the space very well so you had a nice tangible sense of progression. Very much recommended, with a satisfying finish that evoked a strong sense of place.
That afternoon, Spouse, who had been feeling slightly under the weather, developed a cough and tested positive for COVID. Suddenly our plans were looking a lot less certain. She quarantined in our room (I booked a separate room for me and the kids had their own room). What a bummer for her – she was likely going to miss the rest of the escape rooms on the trip. We determined to do them if they would allow 3 players.
That night, Kid2 and I did a ghost tour of New Orleans. It was honestly pretty lame – the stories were neither believable nor particularly spooky, and we didn’t see much that we hadn’t seen just by wandering around the French Quarter for a couple of hours. Also, ghost tours are such a big thing that there were like 10 different groups of 10-20 people each all in the same general area, so we were constantly seeing other groups. Maybe the experience is better if you’re buzzed – we’re not drinkers (and Kid2 is underage) and it was just not very interesting sober. We left at the break after the first hour.
The next day was New Year’s Eve, and the plan was for two more Clue Carré rooms: Revenge on the Bayou, and Vampire Hunters.
Revenge was a very nice little room. Nice set design, and the light story carried through well. The puzzles were fairly straightforward and there was only a little searching for things (as noted, our kryptonite), so we moved through it quickly. Shoutout to Kid2 who saw an item in the second room and immediately connected it to a bit of decor in the first room which I had completely forgotten. This felt like a great room to recommend to newbies, since it got everything right and was fairly straightforward, but featured a high quality set and thematic puzzles.
Vampire Hunters was the weakest of the Clue Carré rooms we did. The minimal story was fine, but the initial room felt fairly uninspired and was really dark – we had lanterns, but spent a lot of time trying to read things in the dim light in a way that felt less fun and more just a little annoying. I did like the portraits on the wall both for ambiance (look at them from multiple angles) as well as a nice thematic puzzle design.
The macguffin for the room was a stake with which to kill the vampire, and unfortunately the code to get it was guessable, so we had it 20 minutes in. We decided it would be more fun to finish the room as intended, so we pretended we hadn’t found it. And then we got stuck on a puzzle and needed a clue, and then got stuck again due to not noticing something obvious. Sigh. We like to think of ourselves as competent, and then we get tripped up by silly mistakes. Overall the room was fine, but I would recommend every other room so far above this one.
We had a fancy dinner, sans Spouse, at Peche for NYE. It was a very good seafood tasting menu, which is probably less exorbitant on days that aren’t special. It was a letdown for the three of us to be there without Spouse, though of course much worse for her to be locked in a room by herself with no interesting puzzles that allow for escape. We hopped on to Zoom and played cards for a while, but then headed to bed well before midnight, or at least I did.
That night was the terrorist attack in New Orleans.
It was very late and we were nowhere near it, but it was still rather scary to read about in the morning. It was all anyone was talking about, of course. A tragic and sobering reminder that there is much more going on in the world than escape rooms, and there are much scarier events than stories of ghosts or vampires. We live in a society that, despite everything, is still relatively open and built on trust, and it’s awful when someone abuses it for senseless mass murder.
So New Year’s Day was a grim affair. We had planned to fly to Florida, but with Spouse still positive and isolating, that was out. What should we do with our day?
More escape rooms, obviously.
The kids slept in, and then we grabbed lunch and went to the Escape Game. This is a franchise with multiple locations, and we’d previously done several of their rooms. However they had two rooms in New Orleans we hadn’t done yet, with some availability. Unusually for rooms these days, you can get grouped with randoms if you don’t buy out the whole room, and the times that worked already had some players. So we played with a couple in the first room, and a couple with a child (~12 yo) in the second. None of them had done an escape game before.
We aimed to turn down our usual enthusiasm and aim for more inclusivity so as not to do the whole room while our new friends watched. This met with limited success in the first room of The Heist, where we found the puzzles to be fairly obvious and directed execution more than shared solving. However we got a bit stuck on a physical puzzle in the transition to the next section of the game, and everyone got a chance to try and fail at an awkward physical task. In the next room there was more to do and so we could designate more clearly puzzles for people to work on.
Overall the game was nice – high production values, solid puzzles that were a mix of different types: physical, translation, logic, connections, and the 3.5 rooms within the game made it feel large and like we were making good progress. The theming was well done, and carried through into many of the clues. It’s marked as 8/10 difficulty but didn’t feel hard to me, and I think would be a fine room for beginners. We did need a clue to find a keyhole we had overlooked, again showing that we are terrible at finding things. As usual we just needed to move an object and nobody did.
The second game was Prison Break (this company goes for very literal names). We had a split start, which was good in that the newbie family could experience solving some puzzles themselves, and we could work with them as well to solve joint puzzles. We had a lucky break where I was doing a challenging physical task not realizing that it wouldn’t work until the other half solved a puzzle to release a part; they coincidentally did it while I was in progress, and it worked out nicely. The early section had a nice mix of self-contained puzzles, communication ones, and physical tasks. Getting out of the initial section was slow because of the inexperience of the other group, but it was fine and we had plenty of time and didn’t need hints.
The puzzles ramped up in difficulty in the back half, but by then we were together and made rapid progress, and for once didn’t need help finding anything obvious. Prison Break was definitely harder than the Heist and less beginner friendly.
Overall we liked the Clue Carré rooms more than the Escape Game rooms, except Vampire Hunters. Clue Carré’s set design and theming felt more novel and captured New Orleans much better, which is of course unsurprising given that Escape Game runs the same rooms in lots of locations.
We had one more day in New Orleans. Clue Carré had another location and plenty of availability. We ended up booking three rooms at their Metairie location, and the last room at their New Orleans location. 4 rooms is more than we’ve ever done in a day but we were going to close big.
First up was the Game Museum. This was a room filled with classic games (monopoly, clue, go fish, rubik’s cube, etc) and thematically associated puzzles. This is basically the best possible setup for our particular group – it was nonlinear with lots of puzzles so we could all work in parallel, and (crucially) there was nothing hidden to find. The kids flew through puzzles while I spent some time on a finicky dexterity puzzle, one of my least favorite types, but better me than impatient teens. By the time I had finished they had solved most of the room. The next room featured some minimalist video games and a more typical escape room type puzzle, and those all went fairly smoothly, and we were out.
As it happened, we set a room record! Beating the previous best time by nearly a minute.
(I do wonder sometimes how real the records are. It’s a great experience to set a record, and it might be tempting to let multiple good groups feel that magic. But they certainly didn’t claim we set records for any of their other rooms, so in this case I’m inclined to believe it.)
The game master did a great job of playing up our achievement, and also said that this was their hardest room so he expected great things for the next two.
Next was the Sheriff's Office. For whatever reason, jail themed rooms tend to be split start, and this was as well. We made some quick early progress, then got stuck on a puzzle where the goal was to open a letter lock, the letters in question were obvious, and we needed a hint to get the order right. Partly this was us being dumb, but also partly the lock unusually didn’t take a thematic word, so our habit of anagramming rather than looking at all the details backfired. The room overall was nicely done, lightly western themed with a jail overlay. We were nowhere close to a record.
Finally at this location, after a quick snack break at the nearby mall, we did The Fright Before Christmas. It was Halloween themed (only the very slightest hint of Christmas) with essentially no story, but the puzzles were thematic and fun. We got thoroughly bamboozled by a red herring (not sure if it was intentional) and lost a bunch of time, and then just completely failed to remember to look around the room to connect pieces with the right puzzle. Kid1: “We didn’t even try, we weren’t even playing the game!” Kid1 also made a math error, which is highly uncharacteristic and suggests that we were perhaps a bit fatigued. No record but also no clues. The room felt pretty short/light compared to the others at the location. Good for beginners, with very clear signposting for what clues went with what lock.
Overall we felt that the Metairie location was a clear drop in quality from the New Orleans location for Clue Carré. The story and set design in Voodoo Cemetery and Revenge on the Bayou were both much nicer than anything at Metairie, which felt a little more basic / generic. The New Orleans location felt like New Orleans. The Metairie location rooms could have been anywhere.
With expectations set, we headed back to New Orleans for dinner and our last room, Clue Carré’s Carnival Heist.
While this room lacked the amazing theming of Voodoo Cemetery and Revenge on the Bayou and didn’t feel quite so New Orleans, it had some genuinely funny writing and unusual puzzles. There was an unusual split start where one side had a walkie talkie, and the other could hear from a walkie talkie that was locked in a box but couldn’t transmit without solving puzzles. This one way communication had some interesting consequences, where the incentive was to communicate everything since you didn’t know what was relevant.
One of the rooms had an extremely finicky matching puzzle and we failed to notice important details, and worse, once it became clear we didn’t have enough information, we didn’t go back over our clues to see if there was more info to be gleaned. Consequence: needed a hint. I blame tiredness from a long week and this being the fourth room in the day.
The center room where the two split groups rejoined was a lot of fun, an art gallery with a New Orleans palette and satisfying puzzles. The smug and hilarious posters from the “security company” that promised you’d never escape were great. And the Indiana Jones-esque final puzzle was also a hoot. One small element I appreciated was that the first group into the center room could just let the other side in, which reduced the waiting around problem split start games sometimes have.
Overall despite noro, covid, terrorists, and our persistent inability to remember to look under and behind things, we mostly had a great time. Or at least, those of us who got to play the games had a great time. Our final categorization, in chronological order within category, is:
Outstanding rooms, worth a trip:
Man from Beyond
Cutthroat Caverns
Strong rooms we would recommend without hesitation:
Wizard (we debated moving this up, or creating a category in between outstanding and strong for Wizard)
Voodoo Cemetary
Revenge on the Bayou
Carnival Heist
Perfectly cromulent rooms worth playing:
The Heist
Prison Break
Game Museum (beat our time!)
Sheriff’s Office
Probably do the other ones first:
Vampire Hunters
Fright Before Christmas
Not recommended:
Norovirus
Covid
Mass murder