40 Thieves – Mindtrap – Team Capybara

Easily the number one escape room we’ve played, though I’ve only hit about a dozen at this point.

The room starts with an incredibly well done intro that wouldn’t be out of place at a Disneyland dark ride. From that, you’re let loose into the first room which is a market full of non-linear puzzles. The sheer amount of puzzles in this one is pretty high, and they manage to have just about every kind: search and place, counting, alignment, etc. No combo locks, but a lot of the puzzles have the shortcut of if you figure out the first 3 parts, just brute force the last part. We also had a lot of random brute forced moments by accident, but nothing ruined the game (actually kind of funny). Theme is on point and the surprises and reveals were super cool.

What I especially like about this room is that there are no red herrings. There are elements that aren’t used until later, or puzzles that you can’t solve until you unlock certain things, but nothing that is completely useless.

We managed to do this as a 2 person team, but I definitely recommend a solid 4 players for this game. Lots of puzzles and things to do as a group, just need to keep track of solved puzzles. The last part was especially hard with two people as there were so many tasks and you had to hunt for things scattered around the entire area!

Big Bro: It was hard and fun. And at the end we had to do a lot of running. I liked doing all the doors in the first room, because I could just take out the door pieces out of the crate without even using the lock!

Location: Murietta
Date: Dec 28, 2024
Escaped: Yes
Time: 57:13

Spoiler Review

The first room has plenty of things to do, but most of them are more “Tasks” than they are puzzles. I always hate counting puzzles because they never make sense (why would the person think there would always be exactly X of this object here?), and it’s the same in this case, but luckily, there was only one.

Most of the tasks to get the favor coins from the market stalls fall into the tasks as stated above, but there are some funny moments, when my son was able to use his small hands to reach into a crate (meaning it has holes on the side) and grab a star piece for the door without opening the lock on the crate.

The hidden alleyway room is where the puzzles start for me, and it contains one of the best reveals I’ve ever seen for a secret passageway. In general, the rest of the room had a good amount and type of puzzles, from smell-based pouches to feeling for knobs in jars of snakes.

The final puzzle is the hardest, mainly due to the mechanics, and was the one that kept us running! There are 9 clock faces with animals on them. You have to grab the animal staff, see what number it reveals in another room, then run around throughout the whole area to find where the button to control that clock is. Then one person has to press while another person has to stay in the clock room to see when it’s time to stop. I attempted to try to get a ticks per second strategy going so I could get everyone to solo each of the 9 clock faces themselves, but timing this was still very difficult. We eventually had to do the two person method for all of them.

What really makes this room stand out is the theming. The marketplace is perfect, the technology is amazing and you’re immersed in the story throughout the entire time you’re there, from intro to ending. This caliber of theming is rarely matched, especially by rooms without live actors, and keeps 40 thieves number one on my list.