Location: Clayton, NC

Players:  2-8 (We recommend 2-4)

Price: $27.75 plus a $.69 booking fee per person (With the option to make the experience private for a flat $150 added on.)

Time to Escape: 60 minutes

The Point is that this room’s design is Broken.

Theme:

Your team of thrill seekers are looking to score big by robbing a bank and using the proceeds to fund your future adventures. There’s a sixty minute window during the security shutdown in order to grab any cash and jewels you can before you make your escape.

First Impressions:

After the miserable Asylum, we weren’t expecting much. While we thought the idea for a Point Break themed room was good, we were not holding out much hope for this one. We luckily had some time to hop outside to decompress before entering this room, which we were unfortunately right about.

High Points:

Many of the puzzles inside this room work properly, but they just aren’t that interesting. There’s one interesting reveal early on that grants a bit of satisfaction in solving, but it quickly wears off. The vault door is competently, if not beautifully, designed, and the room does indeed look like a bank office, for better or worse.

Low Points:

We began the room by searching a bunch of books. Not the most auspicious start, as flipping through loads of worn old books does not portend future excitement, but we were willing to give this room a shot. Things never really got too much more exciting, as the majority of the room devolved into guess and check against entirely too many similar locks, a problem that can easily be solved by injecting some sense to the connective tissue of the game by linking puzzles and locks. At no point during this experience did it feel like a Point Break themed room, in fact, this could’ve been called simply “Bank Heist;” a title much more suited to the actual game within. The room as a whole is just generic, with little in the way of clever puzzles, inspired set design, or engaging story. At no point did the stakes feel high, and the immersion of the room was nil. Reset failures disrupted the experience, as locks had not been reset properly on two separate occasions, leaving 6th Se6se 0 for 2 in the room reset department.

This room is advertised as the most challenging experience this business has to offer, but much of the challenge comes from poorly thought out puzzles with very little connective tissue between them, and a game flow that stalls out constantly due to the ill planned progression of the game. 6th Se6se reuses multiple puzzle types from their other rooms, and these tend to be some of the least interesting interactions those rooms offered. When spending the amount of money required to book an escape room here, you’d expect much more engaging interactions, but at one point, we quite literally found ourselves assembling a jigsaw puzzle. In a bank vault. For no other reason other than, “because escape room.” It’s maddening how incredibly banal the whole experience is. The bank vault itself can’t save this room either, as it remains as creatively devoid as the rest of the game, a bland room with a bunch of locks does not a bank vault make. I’ve seen a small room turned into a visually interesting vault before at The Exit Games, and they also had a fantastic game flow to back it up. This sort of terrible design all around is just indefensible. The set is literally a converted office room, the game is a jumbled mess, and there isn’t a story to speak of. Overall, this is easily one of the worst escape rooms I’ve ever done.

Verdict:

6th Se6se’s most difficult room is impossible to recommend. If you’re interested in a Point Break room, you’ll not find one here. Even if a generic bank heist room is what you’re looking for, you can find much better ones elsewhere, for a cheaper price point. While one or two puzzles may be satisfying to solve, they get lost in the sea of banality and mediocre design across the board. Despite my warnings, if you would like to check this room out, you can do so here.

2/10 (Bad)