Escape Room Palm Springs: Bank Heist (Palm Springs)

I wish we could have escaped doing this room

Your lookout has been casing Last National Bank for months. You and your crack team have been assembled to pull off this caper which will involve sneaking past the bank’s high-tech security, hacking your way into a computer, and working out and deciding how you’ll break into the vault. Your objective: Get as much loot as you can before the police come and spoil all the fun.

Our third and fortunately final room at Escape Palm Springs was ‘Bank Heist’, which we later found out was their easiest room and one that people normally start on, whoops.  It was in the same building as their other rooms (just look at our ‘Titanic’ or ‘Merlin’s Magic Room’ reviews to see our thoughts on their set up).

The premise for this room is simple, you need to collect 12 security deposit box keys and break out before the Police arrive. The weird thing about this room is that you don’t have to collect all 12, it’s up to you when you have had enough, and when you do you simply flick a switch and the room is over.

The room was made up of multiple rooms as you would expect but we later found out that you could take different routes to the vault. Getting into the vault was very simple and there was a brief amount of excitement when we saw the lasers that it contained, however it was a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ type of thing as no sooner had we seen and got excited by the lasers, the GM turned them off – yes literally flipped a switch to turn them off.

There was no sense of completion with this room, you were following the story and collecting the keys but then at the end the GM said “you don’t have to open the boxes if you don’t want to, it doesn’t change anything. So if you’re done just flip the switch”.  This was another room at Escape Palm Springs that when we left we just wished we hadn’t bothered.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the ‘free gift’ that we got for finding something hidden in the room – because of course all bank vaults have something hidden saying ‘You’ve won a prize’.

PUZZLES

The puzzles in this room were very simple and sometimes that is where we fall down as we have a habit to over complicate things. There wasn’t a great number of puzzles in this room and only one of them was challenging, and when I say challenging I mean frustrating. I don’t want to give anything away but it was a puzzle that even when the GM gave us the answer and explained it, it didn’t make sense at all.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

The room design wasn’t actually too bad and the rooms actually felt like you were potentially in a bank so credit to them for that. However the room was feeling pretty tired and due to the way the room ended we left feeling like we had just wasted an hour of our lives.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

Once again at Escape Palm Springs the GM was standing in the room for the entire time. Not much more to say than that, it was odd.  On speaking to them about it they say it is policy they have for two player teams which we didn’t really understand.

ANYTHING ELSE

Our views on this room were probably screwed by our experience as this room is really designed for beginners, but even then it didn’t feel like a particularly well thought out room.

Success / Failure

Final Rating: