Location: Charlotte, NC
Players: 2-10 (We recommend 3-5)
Price: $25 per person
Time to Escape: 60 minutes
Boned.
Theme:
From the No Da Escapes website:
A team of modern archaeologists have found the remains of a Giganotosaurus inside an old gem mine. The Giganotosaurus is one of the rarest types of dinosaurs and is related to the T-Rex. A mole has worked their way into your group and has stolen a piece of the skeleton for personal profit. The stolen bone is believed to still be hidden in the cave where the dinosaur’s skeleton was found. Your mission is to retrieve the stolen bone and return it to the head archaeologist. The problem is, you only have 60 minutes before the cave collapses and you are sealed inside forever.
First Impressions:
After the terrible Dracula’s Lair, it was time to take on No-Da’s more recent creation, Jurassic Bone. We didn’t exactly have high hopes after what we’d just experienced, but perhaps some lessons had been learned along the way to make Jurassic Bone more palatable? The theme certainly was original!
High Points:
Jurassic Bone is rather large, so a bigger group won’t feel smushed into the room, though there wasn’t as many activities as there was room for. There are a few interesting ideas around, with a water based puzzle that we enjoyed working through, as well as a couple out of the box items we hadn’t seen used in quite the way they were here. The room did a good job of connecting puzzles to locks on the whole, though there were a few repeats, but on the whole didn’t overlap during the game flow. The theme itself is a great idea, though it isn’t fully capitalized on.
Low Points:
Jurassic Bone is a really large escape room, but at many points during the game, it just feels empty. “Big to be big” was the general sentiment of our group. For a game that has a maximum of ten players, it just doesn’t have all that much to do, and a mostly linear game flow does not help matters any. The experience itself also feels rather static, as the puzzles and interactions are generally mildly interesting, but don’t really feel like they add to the room or theme in a dynamic way. Solving them allowed us to move forward, but didn’t really trigger much excitement, or carry a greater impetus for why these actions were important. One particular puzzle had a creative and out of the box idea behind it, but it’s inclusion felt random, and it was extremely finicky to boot. Though I had performed the correct action, it didn’t trigger, causing me to leave it behind before someone else tried it in a slightly different way, popping the obstinate lock.
One of the major selling points listed for this room is that it takes place underground. Technically it does, but it is like a half basement in that it still opens up to the outside and never really feels truly underground, nor does this partial underground-ness really add anything. Parts of the room also feel unnecessary, as we were able to trigger a late game puzzle’s solution without properly placing certain bits, leading to a weird anti-climax that wouldn’t really have benefitted much from us placing those bits anyway. The big reveal at the end it laughable, with one of the poorest looking props we’ve ever seen in the giant foam bone. Unfortunately, this was also the only part of the room that really stuck to the Jurassic theme we were hoping for as well.
Verdict:
While a marked improvement from Dracula’s Lair, Jurassic Bone just doesn’t quite measure up to the other rooms available in the Charlotte area. On the whole, it’s just an average experience and I would recommend checking out one of the many other rooms in the area long before this one. If you’d like to try your hand at retrieving the big foam bone, however, you can do so here.
5/10 (Mediocre)
Full Disclosure: No Da Escapes provided our group with Media Discounted tickets.
Escape Room Adventurer 