Escape Room Review: Escape the Room PA – Pittsburgh, PA

This is part of our series of Escape Room reviews.

Ratings

• Room Name: The Newsroom
• Room Size:  (6-8)/11/12 people ( our recommendation/as played/max)
• Time: 60 minutes
• Overall:  3.0/5.0
• Theme:     4.0/5.0
• Puzzles:    3.0/5.0
• Difficulty: 3.0/5.0

Looking for an activity with a group of 11 friends, we chose this escape room since it had larger rooms that could accommodate our full group and was in a decent location.

The Good

• In a trendy part of town ("South Side")
• Clues communicated via monitor were helpful, but not overly so
• We always had something to work on
• Nice craftsmanship on the newsroom / skyline
• Room was not full of distracting red herrings. Easy to focus on the correct items
• The three keypads were a nice feature - didn't have to mess as much with locks as in other rooms
• There were two separate threads 
• We were able to finish it just in time (difficulty level was about right)

The Bad 

• Parking was on-street, and pretty difficult to find on a Wednesday evening. We squeezed into a tight spot several blocks away. Note: neighborhood is not particularly kid-friendly.
• There was a dreadful puzzle with some charts that was frustrating and disappointing. One of the pie charts had a mistake in it, and the answer was not at all satisfying. Thank goodness we are experienced with escape rooms and brought pencil and paper in with us. Also, you had to read the answer to this puzzle out loud which was cheesy since it broke the fourth wall concept. (Although perhaps the idea was that you were being a real newscaster; ok I'll give them a pass on this one)
• Building is narrow and waiting area is a bit cramped
• It was too linear; everyone in the group pretty much had to work on the same puzzles at the same time
• There was a video camera that wasn't supposed to move but it got moved somehow and this messed up one of the puzzles but we managed to get past it anyhow
• They took several of our e-mail addresses but then never e-mailed the group photo to us!

Overall this room was pretty good and we would recommend it if you have a large group, since it is one of the few rooms in town that could accommodate it. I hope they replace the charts puzzle, as it would be trivial to do so and everything else would still work.