SCHOOL OF HARD LOCKS ESCAPE ROOM

Art Class replaced one of my favorite Halloween themed rooms from 2015, but it is not comparable to it. The Art Class is a “classroom” themed escape room located in Carlsbad near San Diego. The story is great. They have a wonderful backstory about the school. The lobby has pictures that help show the story. There are also lockers for your personal items during the game. The Art Class room’s decor is fine. It’s basically decorated with student artwork. You enter and exit through the same door. The puzzles, however, were less than creative and even worse…illogical. (It wasn’t as bad as the Principal’s Office that I played the same day at this location. It is now closed. That one actually had a puzzle that when we asked how we were supposed to solve it and were told that basically we just guess because the rest of the puzzle we were looking for to solve it wasn’t even in the room.) I was most frustrated with a lock that had a very muddy answer, so much so that the game master couldn’t get it unlocked and the second employee couldn’t get it open without holding the answer code in hand and still struggled a bit. How are we supposed to figure out the answer if the staff can’t even figure it out and they know the answer. We actually had some difficulty with our game master when it came to getting hints. She came in the room and couldn’t figure out where we were in the puzzles, then pulled out a sheet of notes and started reading through them hoping it would help us. Overall, I was incredibly disappointed in the Art Class.