Timed Out – Precinct (Review)

Location: Charlotte, NC

Players: 2-8 (We recommend 3-5)

Price: $28 per person

Time to Escape: 60 minutes

It may be an abandoned police station, but it still has doughnuts!

Theme:

From the Timed Out website:

Set against the backdrop of three missing police officers, your team’s ability to unravel the story of Precinct will be tested by challenges that require analytical skills, deductive reasoning and collaboration. If you’re successful, you’ll progressively uncover the details behind the mysterious disappearances and seize opportunities to change the outcome of the series of events. But be careful – you’ll need to avoid be pulled into the very things you’re trying to prevent!

First Impressions:

Police Stations and prisons are an old standby for escape rooms at this point, so it really takes a masterful hand to ensure they remain fresh, especially for escape room veterans, and after doing two other rooms at Timed Out, we were sure Precinct would be a lot of fun! We were advised it was their most challenging room, and we were ready to take it on!

High Points:

Our game master for this game was McKenna, and she expertly sent us a couple clues when we began to flounder or became too confident in our wrong answers, she read the room perfectly and did an excellent job! As an aside, she is also the writer for Timed Out’s blog, which I really enjoyed reading through. I’ve never read an escape room blog run by a business that is quite this varied or interesting to peruse, so I definitely recommend checking it out! You can find it here.

Precinct’s set is very well done, with some cool touches to add immersion, and an awesome old style phone booth that was great fun to play around in. The introduction video and the soundtrack of the room keep energy high without being overly loud or intrusive, and helped tie the story in as we progressed. The video that ended the room was also a fitting dénouement, and tied up all the loose ends neatly. The experience is ever evolving throughout the room, and several surprises popped up regularly to keep us saying “wow!” The whole room is really awesome, design-wise, and the owners let me know they were going to further iterate the set to make it even more immersive, which is great to hear!

Challenging rooms, I find, come in two different varieties. Those which are difficult for the sake of difficulty, and those that weave the challenge throughout the room in an engaging, but fair way. Precinct is definitely the latter version. The difficulty of this room comes not from a puzzle designer that wants to “beat” the players, but from one that really understands how to create a fun challenge, packing the room with creative puzzles that force your group to act as a team; engaging keen perception and out of the box thinking to succeed! So much within this room was a thrill to interact with and the puzzle density was just right to keep all three of us fully entertained. The non-linear set up could definitely handle a maximum of eight players, and no one would ever feel like they were just standing around. The game flow is almost perfect, with all props and puzzles having a purpose and integrating into the theme fantastically. The signposting of clues and astounding gating that can be found here is just top notch all around. The climax of the room was an absolute blast, and caught us all by surprise! It added an excellent twist to the room and ended it on an exceedingly high note after a run of already excellent puzzles.

Low Points:

One particular puzzle is rather onerous, as it requires a fair amount of guess and check. It isn’t the most egregious version of guess and check, as you’re able to develop somewhat of a framework to work off of, but it still was a bit too much for our liking. There was a quicker way to solve this puzzle that was a small hack, so that was a relief. One prop activates with some experimentation, but didn’t give us feedback that our experimentation led to a wrong answer, leading us to believe that the green lights we had found were placed correctly. Our GM was quick to redirect our thinking regarding this, but a small bit more feedback would’ve helped.

Verdict:

Precinct was my absolute favorite room at Timed Out, and one of my favorites during our most recent trip to Charlotte! I absolutely recommend giving it a go, though newer players might want to give one of their easier games a shot first to get a feel for escape rooms. The game masters here are excellent, however, and I’m sure they’d be happy to tailor the difficulty for you if investigating an abandoned police station is your jam. Book your time in the Precinct here!

9/10 (Excellent)

Full Disclosure: Timed Out provided comped tickets for our group.