This is something that’s been weighing on me as more and more escape rooms close their doors. I’ve heard some people suggest escape room reviews on review sites like Google and Yelp aren’t hard enough on games. I agree we need to talk about how we review escape rooms and how those reviews are affecting the survival of the industry we all love.
If you’re someone who plays a lot of escape rooms—10, 20, 50, 100+ you naturally start to develop preferences. You’ve seen incredible set design. You’ve experienced mind-blowing puzzles. You’ve traveled to play the “best of the best.” That’s awesome. Truly. But that perspective comes with a responsibility that I don’t think we talk about enough.
Because Google and Yelp are not the place to be harder on escape rooms.
Those platforms are not designed for seasoned enthusiasts comparing puzzle flow, narrative depth, or tech integration. They are for the general public—the family looking for something fun to do on a Saturday, the group of friends choosing between mini golf, bowling, or an escape room, the parent planning a birthday party.
On those platforms, an escape room isn’t being compared to the best game you played in another state—it’s being compared to everything else in the area that’s not an escape room.
So if a room is fun, engaging, and would give the average person a great experience, that is a five-star experience in that context.
When experienced players give a room 3 or 4 stars on Google or Yelp because “it wasn’t their favorite” or “they’ve played better,” that doesn’t read as “decent but not top-tier” it reads as “not worth the average beginner’s time” and that can be the difference between a family booking that room or choosing go-karts instead.
And that matters more than you might think.
We are already seeing escape rooms close. Some quietly. Some all at once. Some that you maybe never got the chance to play. Running a small business—especially an escape room—is incredibly challenging. I know this not just as a player, but as an owner. Margins are tight. Marketing is constant. Every booking counts.
Public-facing reviews directly impact whether new players walk through the door. If new players don’t come in, businesses don’t survive. If businesses don’t survive, the industry shrinks. And when the industry shrinks, we all lose—especially the very enthusiasts who want more rooms to play.
This doesn’t mean you should never leave critical feedback. If a room is truly broken, unsafe, poorly run, or you had a genuinely bad experience—say that. That’s important. But there’s a difference between a bad experience and a good experience that just didn’t meet your personal ranking system.
There are spaces for that level of critique. Morty is a great example (although more and more brand new players are finding Morty reviews before they’ve even played their first game). Personal blogs. Community discussions. Those are good place for nuanced opinions, comparisons, and deep dives.
But when it comes to Google and Yelp, we need to think bigger than ourselves.
If you had fun, if you smiled, if you’d recommend it to a friend who doesn’t play escape rooms every weekend—that is worth five stars because that score isn’t about declaring something “the best game ever made” and it doesn’t change your value as a reviewer, it’s about helping that business stay alive long enough to keep creating, improving, and contributing to the community.
If you love escape rooms, then supporting the community means sharing it with new players in a positive way—leaving the “harsh critic” hat at home.