As a huge fan of the movie Bloodsport when I was in high school, I couldn’t wait to try an escape room themed around Kowloon walled city.
Right off the bat, I can tell that Escape Room LA is really, really good at theming. From the first room to the alley, the details were amazing. What they also do really differently here is instead of cameras and the “voice of God,” your GM is actually in your room with you, acting as a character. I think it’s definitely an interesting spin on things. We ended up not interacting too much with him since we only needed one hint, which actually turned out to be that we solved it correctly, but just had an alignment issue.
The room starts with a very cool and unique intro, that’s perfectly themed to its setting. It’s not a knock your socks moment, but it did make me smile. Once you open the alleyway there are tons of non-linear puzzles to do, though as you near the end, things get a bit more linear. I think the sweet spot for this room is about 3-4 people.
In terms of the puzzles, I think everything made sense for the most part, and had a range of high tech to combo locks. There is some use of Chinese language involved, but be aware that you don’t need to speak it, and that the puzzles are designed for non-speakers, so don’t overthink things. My main knock against this room is that some of the mechanisms are very finicky. I’m not a fan of where you can “fail” a puzzle if a rectangle is flipped the wrong way, and there are a couple of those types of puzzles at play here.
Overall though, my son and I, and the meetup group we were with, had a great time and managed to escape with around 9 minutes to spare with no real hints used! Definitely recommend this escape room.
Big Bro: My favorite puzzle was the blocks. I also liked eating the fortune cookies at the beginning. The decorations were really cool.
Team Capybara 
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