The Alchemist

Puzzles flowed really well together. Things were parallelizable when they needed to be. The actor in the room was not over hinting. 2nd best room at Escape Room LA.

This room is the reason why I always check to make sure rooms are private. Their rooms are “hard” because they fill them to the brim with puzzles and then fill it with strangers who knows how well they work together. It was a horrible experience.

I wasn’t a fan of this room but we also failed big time so feel free to call me biased. Also, played several years ago, so my memory might be hazy - therefore take this with a grain of salt. This was precovid so you were allowed to book rooms with strangers, which I did. I think the MINIMUM for this room was like… 10 people? And man, did they mean that. We were a part of 10 right before the GM came up to us and told us people had dropped out of the booking… Nothing we could do so we went ahead. The first room wasn’t that crazy, we got a little lost and also skipped through a puzzle or 2 but the second room was our downfall, and I don’t know if it continued after that but it didn’t matter because we didn’t. They split the group into 4 smaller teams so you could each work on 4 element puzzle, and we only had enough people for 2 teams, so we got stuck pretty quickly, plus we had limited hints (the GM was super awesome through all of this btw and very funny). Our time ran out and that was that. I think mostly it was very hard (which it was advertised as being) and we were beginners so that’s on us entirely, but I didn’t find the puzzles themselves to be that fun to do. It was a long time ago but I do remember there were elements of figuring out codes and science-y puzzles that I didn’t find engaging. I thought it would be more mystery and fantasy based but they really went literal scientist/alchemist with it, which was a disappointment to me. It was kind of fun but I think that was more that I enjoyed my friends company, and mostly we left feeling kind of bummed and underwhelmed by the experience. The set was ok - lots of stone from what I remember and stuff like scales and books - but I’ll be sure to research more carefully before I come back to this venue. I have a feeling with the right amount of people picking/having a better idea of what the story is, we’ll have a much more fun time, but for now, not a fan of this particular room. I know it’s closed, there’s a video of it on YouTube if anybody wants to see what it looked like!

One of my favorite rooms from this company. It was varied, had a strong theme, and created an entertaining experience.