Escape Room Palm Springs: Titanic (Palm Springs)

We should have just gone down with the ship

The “unsinkable” Titanic is going down. Fortunately, you overheard the captain speak of a hidden life boat at dinner. This may be construed as mutiny but you decide to gather your crew and work your way through Captain Smith’s cabin anyway. Discover what secrets Captain Smith has been keeping from the passengers and crew.

On a cold and windy day in Palm Springs we thought we’d escape the weather and try out some escape rooms. Our first room of the day was ‘Titanic’ where the premise is that you have to find the last hidden life boat before the ship goes down.

On entering the building you can’t help but notice how this feels much more like a money spinner than something built by enthusiasts with love. You fill in the waiver and then are guided down a narrow hallway with doors on both sides which contain other rooms and the GM lairs.

The room was very basic and certainly didn’t have the feel of a Captain’s bedroom on the luxury liner, but that’s fine, we can let that slide. The strangest thing you notice about rooms at this venue is that the rooms don’t have ceilings, this means you lose some immersion but more annoyingly you can hear people in all the other rooms and even the GMs talking in the rooms around you.

Doing this room as a two felt like a good number as we certainly didn’t have a lot to keep us busy and unfortunately the room was very disjointed so we just didn’t know where to go next. I wouldn’t want to do this room with a bigger group as I can’t see what everyone would actually do in there – perhaps count the padlocks?

This room got us out of the bad weather for an hour but next time I think we’ll just go to the cinema.

PUZZLES

The puzzles in this room were a mixed bag, some seemed very easy and some were a bit more difficult. A lot of things felt disjointed and for a fair amount of the room we were left standing around wondering what we should do next.

One puzzle was particularly poorly worded and as such we spent ages just starting at it trying to work it out, in the end we had to get a clue. Even when it was explained it didn’t feel obvious and more like a ‘no-one would ever get that’ type of situation.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

At no point did we feel like we were on a sinking ship, but more like a strange room in an amusement arcade with other people cheering all around us. When the power went out it seemed like we had every single employee come in at various points to check that things were working, in the end I just told them to not bother trying to get the TV up and running again as I had the time on my watch.

The set design was pretty lazy and there was nothing in the room that was exceptional or even ‘wow’.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

The clues were delivered via walkie-talkies if you needed them and were unlimited. Unfortunately our GM wasn’t overly attentive so when we needed to ask for a clue we had to spend a couple of minutes explaining what we had already done and where we were. Generally pretty poor.

ANYTHING ELSE

It probably didn’t help that we did this room when there were strong winds which cut the power, but it did ruin the experience for us and had I not been keeping track of the time on my watch then we probably wouldn’t have known how long we took.

Success / Failure

Final Rating: