I found myself in the Palms Springs area with some time for myself and decided I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could do an escape room solo. I called ahead of time and the owner let me know that all but one of his games could technically be done by one person, so I jumped at the chance to do their highest rated room.
You start off locked in a jail cell on your ship, and have to escape with a mild and thematic dexterity puzzle. From there, you have what looks like multiple puzzles to solve, but for the most part, the room ended up being linear as you had to solve them in a specific order in most cases. The puzzles were mostly standard, but there is a lot of variety and none of them were bad puzzles. After the ship, and this is not a spoiler if you read the title of the room, you end up on skull island and have to solve the multiple puzzles here, which are mostly non-linear.
Throughout the experience, what really stood out for me was the production value. The materials, the smells, and the objects were all super thematic. There were also a couple of cinematic wow moments in this room which were fantastic. The GM talks to you through a parrot with a voice changer, so even that is thematic. Though note that the parrot will announce the time every 10 minutes, which sometimes scared me, haha.
In the end, I managed to escape with about 10 minutes left, needing only one hint for a puzzle I wasn’t paying attention closely enough to! It definitely felt gratifying to solve a room by yourself in terms of accomplishment, but not as fun as sharing in the victory with a group. At least the GM was there to celebrate with me!
On one critical note, the one thing that I didn’t like about this room was the red herrings. There was a puzzle that when solved, spelled out a certain word, but it wasn’t used for anything. There were also things that seemed like clues, but were just meaningless text. In general, I’m not a fan of using text as a decoration in rooms for that reason.
I can definitely recommend Mutiny: Skull Island, as the production value for this room is off the charts and all of the puzzles made sense to me. I do also recommend trying to do a solo room for the experience, but one time is enough for me!
Team Capybara 
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