Neverland The Hunt For Thinkerbell

Fun to do, but alot of guidance required in order to escape. Theme is fun, set not as polished as I would have liked. Don’t go into this room thinking you can beat it by yourself.

Super well done set work and puzzle design. Lots of tricky puzzles requiring going between different rooms and following clues around. Super fun character and theme.

I'm going to preface this with a few things. One: We played 3 of their rooms back to back on the same day. Two: I have played hundreds of escape rooms. Three: this review is based on my experience and has some of my personal preferences and opinions mixed in with facts. I like to break my reviews into multiple parts and provide each part with a sub-score from 1 to 5 stars and, in the end, provide a cumulative aggregate score based on all of the sub-scores. The areas that I review are as follows: - Pre-experience (booking process, rules and initial interaction, pre-game logistics) - The experiences itself (immersion, puzzles, story, game flow, set, cleanliness, clues, clue delivery system, actors, game masters, and room element functionality) - Post-experience (exit from the experience, picture, and wrap up.) 🗝 PRE-EXPERIENCE: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ So to start, I liked their website. It was easy to use and mobile-friendly. The booking software is Resova which is my preferred booking software. The room art and descriptions are nice and informative. Though I do believe they do a poor job saying on their website that you MUST bring 4 or more people to play, or it may cause issues. We didn't find out until we arrived that typically you have to bring at least 4. We thought it was just a ticket minimum thing for financial reasons like other establishments, not gameplay reasons. We happily paid for 4 tickets even though there were only 3 of us. The parking was easy, and the place was easy to find. We were greeted by a kind staff member and a clean lobby and restroom. The video for rules was informative, and the waivers were easy. A few things that didn't sit well with me: They give you free drinks if you write a review there on the spot. This caused inflated reviews and artificial scores. They have posters posted everywhere for weird micro up-sells for the rooms, like pay $90 to be a VIP for a room and get things, but it was vague and promoted you to ask an employee. Also, it had a variety of things posted to provide tips to staff which is just slightly tacky in my opinion, even though we ended up tipping everyone just to be kind, and they really pushed it. More on this later. Now, after the initial logistics, we locked up our things and had the info given to us, which was good. And we went into the experience. 🗝 THE EXPERIENCE: ⭐️ Let's start with the good. The actor/game master in the room (not my preference to have a game master in the room, so that part isn't good) was in character the whole time, had a great accent, and was helpful...because he needed to be... And the set was decent, not great, but a lot of square footage, and above average, I'd say, in terms of effort. Unfortunately, that's all the good I can say about this room. Now on to the bad: Again like their other rooms, this one was also not the cleanest. Dated, worn, and looked neglected. Additionally, this escape room suffered from a couple of glaring issues. First: there was far too much MATH. Math kills the flow, the mood; it kills everything, in my opinion, in escape rooms. Second, there were many actual puzzles in this room, like puzzles you buy at the store and try to figure out, whether it be puzzle pieces or strange puzzle games. It felt like they gathered all escape room "like" target games and shoved them into this escape room. I found myself with pieces to several puzzles all at once while trying to solve multiple math problems all at once. It was chaos. So much so the in-room game master was literally walking us through the entire thing; he didn't stop talking. A group of 3 people who have done hundreds of escape rooms - and we were very, very lost. Listen, I go to escape rooms to enjoy the experience, not to win all the time; but when I find myself in an escape room that is frustrating, and only 5% of the experience actually makes sense to me, often, this is indicative of improper game flow, and lack of creativeness. My teammates also shared my feelings. The story didn't make sense; the puzzles were disjointed and confusing. At one point, our game master told us, "yes, you have everything you need for that puzzle" - we tried and tried to figure it out, spent a good 10 minutes on it, and gave up. We made it into another room, and there on the wall was the key to the puzzle we were told we had everything for. I look over at the game master, and he gives me a confusing shrug. So it seemed he was even confused at times with everything that was going on. With an experience riddled with too many locks, math problems, and actual puzzles, this escape room is nothing to write home about. 🗝 POST-EXPERIENCE: ⭐️ The post-experience was fine. We were left with a lot of questions, and the game master wasn't interested in connecting the dots for us. The picture walls were nice. OVERALL RATING: ⭐️ out of 5 The primary factors causing the low score: 🔒 set cleanliness and upkeep 🔒 way too many mechanical locks, as well as way too much variety of the same type of lock, making it hard to open because they were hard to read or figure out. 🔒game flow lacks logic and constancy. 🔒puzzles were redundant and required a lot of reading and a lot of help. 🔒game master in the room. 🔒 way too much math. 🔒The game master HAD to help the whole time due to the game lacking cohesion. 🔒way too many actual puzzles with puzzle pieces and puzzle-like games - the kind you can find at target.