River City Escape Room – Alice in Wonderland (Review)

Location: Richmond, VA

Players: 2-6 (We recommend 3-6 )

Price: $25 per person

Time to Escape: 60 minutes

Down the Rabbit Hole

Theme:

From the River City Escape Room website:

Sliding into Wonderland trapped and all Alone…The steps you take are perilous with clues not easily shown.Your Reality is different than ours, as time employs its wrath. Whether growing big or shrinking small, follow the un-logical path.All we know of this MAD world is the Queen rules the day. She must be pleased to leave Wonderland or else you ALL must stay!

First Impressions:

We’ve only done one other Alice themed room, and while fun, it is unfortunately closed. Another of those themes that seem like it’d be amazing for an escape room, but woefully underutilized, I was excited to embark on another trip to Wonderland. With a total of four difficulty levels ranging from Easy to Impossible, we were also interested to see how the room would challenge us. For this adventure, we chose the difficulty tier just under impossible, hard. Impossible just sounded too, well… impossible. We were briefed on our mission, and down the rabbit hole we went!

High Points:

To start, our game master Rachel was by far the best, most personable game master that we have ever had the pleasure of working with. It was obvious from the start that she was passionate about escape rooms and really loves what she does. It is not an exaggeration to say that the whole experience was made even more exciting and fun because of her efforts. The room itself is a wonder to behold, with a colorful and engaging set that is absolutely full of glorious references to the Disney classic. The theming is based more on the whimsical nature of that influential film, rather than the darker live action version, and I think the room benefits from the more light hearted feel. The use of space throughout the experience is amazing, with twists, turns, and dips immersing us within the story and making us feel as though we were growing and shrinking like Alice herself!

One immediate thing we noticed about this room, was that there was a complete lack of locks, and all interactions were technical, and not technical puzzles that just replaced locks, like keypads; this room was completely creative in its presentation of a lockless room! The puzzle flow itself was fantastic, with a couple non-linear paths that wove back towards linearity for the most part, but kept our group of five engaged throughout. Kudos to River City Escape Room for building a room that houses 2-6 players comfortably space and game flow wise, and sticking to that maximum. As hinted at by the introduction and theme, there is a trail of “unlogic” to follow throughout the room, and this is true of several of the puzzles. Don’t worry, however, it is all based within the theme of Alice in Wonderland, and isn’t a game that is completely illogical for the sake of difficulty. In fact, I feel like for a group of enthusiasts, the hard difficulty was just right. The climax of the room is highly interactive and is an appropriately entertaining ending for such a wonderfully creative adventure!

Low Points:

There were a couple of points where lighting came into play and made the game more difficult because we couldn’t properly gauge colors or read a certain excerpt of text. A small spotlight to help ease this difficulty might be nice while still allowing for the trippy Alice in Wonderland colors to liven up the rooms.

Verdict:

River City Escape Room really blew our minds with this amazing experience, the creative and engaging theme, excellent game flow, immersive set, and perfect game mastery combined to deliver an experience truly worthy of Wonderland. I cannot recommend this one enough, and the different difficulty levels are sure to engage all players new and old! You can book your trip down the rabbit hole here!

9/10 (Excellent)