Formerly a Grocery Outlet in the heart of Beaverton, Glowing Greens is now a place where you can play a round of mini-golf, experience a haunted house (at the right time of year), or enter an escape room.
This is about the escape room. You are probably allowed to photograph your golf game.
The no photo policy makes sense. The right photos could spoil the fun for a later party (while also helping them solve it quickly), and although I am not certain, I suspect that the haunted house activities share the space. Certainly some of the props would fit right in.
I have been curious about doing an escape room since I first heard about them, and that interest deepened when they showed one on an episode of The Big Bang Theory. I was a little shocked at the price - $30 per person.
I have to acknowledge that is not unreasonable to charge. They set up the space for you, and you are constantly being watched, not only so you can ask for hints (which you can) but also if you seem to be struggling pointlessly in the wrong direction, a voice may come over the walkie talkie with a suggestion.
It may still be reasonable to question whether the price of the entertainment is worthwhile, because that $30 essentially gives you one hour, whereas a similarly priced concert ticket or dinner purchase could give you two or more hours. I think some of the attraction is that instead of being passively entertained, you are challenging yourself, and testing yourself.
We took a really hard test.
I have not done any other escape rooms, so I can only compare it to what I have seen on television, without really knowing how realistic that was. I do have some thoughts.
Mental Trap has a good amount of space and they make good use of it. That can be a disadvantage too, as it is easy to head off in the wrong direction. In their case, access to various areas was sequential. We wasted time trying one code that it wasn't time for yet, but that was largely because we missed what we should have been working on, behind a dark door. That's when being monitored comes in helpful.
It is possible to take things too literally. Being advised to leave props on their sets made me reluctant to take a slip of paper and pencil with us, though that was clearly the purpose. They said to stick together because teamwork will win the day. That teamwork may sometimes mean someone standing in one room reading something to you. So don't go wandering off in separate directions, but you do not need to stay in a tight cluster.
(In TBBT, at one point a chained zombie burst out from a door, so I was looking around a lot for something like that, and it was not necessary in this case.)
We did not pass the test.
Being in weird circumstances can heighten your sense or make you kind of time. We wasted a lot of time because the person trying the combination locks forgot how they worked (passing 0 and going around twice, those normal things) and we did not know that was happening. Communication, but not communication that we realized we needed.
My primary criticism - and this isn't necessarily bad - is that the puzzles leaned heavily toward the numerical. I don't mind one numerical puzzle, and they were not all the same kind of numerical puzzle, but something that focused more on spatial relations or knowledge of trivia would have played to my strengths more.
(That being said, there were some pretty good pop culture references.)
I stand by my praise of the use of space and the set decoration, but the best thing may have been that the staff was really great. They were helpful without being condescending (which we would have deserved) and after we ran out of time they assured us that this was their hardest puzzle (possibly true) and that we probably would have gotten it with a few more minutes (probably not true, because they showed us and yes, we were getting close to getting the right number, but the sequence after that looked like it would have taken us a while).
I think it could be easy to decide that an escape room is an experience you need to have once, and that's enough, but after having seen a few of the pitfalls and maybe being better at getting around them now, there is a part of me that wants to try again.
https://www.mentaltrap.com/
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