When we arrived we spoke with the owner for several minutes before entering the room. He expressed that while The Alchemist (which we’d just recently completed… a few months after The Patient), is their best and hardest room, he hoped this new room would overtake that as their new number one room.

Only time shall tell, and hopefully not time spent in a mental institution.

Jason had found some contest or opportunity to playtest their new room (The Patient) and contacted the company to see if we could get in to try it out. They accepted, we got a team together, and the rest is history.

There wasn’t a lot of information on the website as to the backstory, so we had to go by a simple description on the website.

Not much to it. Honestly, I’m tired of the investigative journalist bit. I think 5 of the last 10 rooms I did had that as a starting point. Why not be a local good ol’ boy whose twin brother was wrongly convicted of a crime and sentenced to psychological evaluation and has since disappeared before being discharged? Or maybe you’re a retired cop and your son, also a cop, has gone under cover to investigate possible wrongdoing by one of the doctors? (Guess I should just create those rooms…)

Rating: 7/10

Again, not a lot of detail here, and the mental institution is a common theme, but the journalist aspect and having to infiltrate the hospital was an interesting take on it.

Rating: 6.5/10

The rest of the story unfolds as you progress, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we were just sent in kind of blind. Chalk it up to being a play-test? Sure, why not.

Rating: 5/10

The mission provides an intermediate level of challenge, but – again – is not fully original. The clarity of the mission develops a bit as you go through the room, so you’re not told everything upfront, which is okay in this way because of how you progress.

Rating: 6/10

This escape was extremely tech heavy. There were a few papers and a filing cabinet, but everything else was tech. Probably the most interesting thing I’ve seen in an escape room: the way they set up the patients rooms (basically doors with “windows” that were live screens of a patient in each of the rooms). Cool stuff.

Not a single thing was repeated, and there was one type of combination lock that I’d not seen before (an have seen only once since, in another Insomnia room). Additionally, the entire room was just puzzles we’ve not dealt with before, so kudos.

One last thing I will add: The lock type mentioned previously…I don’t like it. You’ll probably be able to figure out why.

Rating: 10/10

I was pretty impressed with how much they were able to cram into this small room and it’s up to you to figure out what is needed vs. what is there solely as decoration. There are some puzzles that you need to figure out (process of elimination) using things you find in the room, and there are some others that are pretty tech-based… tech I’ve never seen before and found out later that the owner custom-designed.

One of the puzzles requires multiple things to solve, so make sure you are good at following directions. If you need help setting up your stereo system or putting together IKEA furniture, for example, you may need to let someone else take point.

So, the overall diversity of the things you find in this room and the types of locks you have to open is pretty well done.

Rating: 9/10

We sped through the room pretty quickly in the beginning, funneling down to a point where we were just flat stuck. (This does not include the time we opened the filing cabinet and started rifling through documents when our GM came on over the intercom and asked us to stop b/c he’d forgotten to reset the lock on it. He stopped us right away, apologized profusely, reset it, and ran out of the room.) This is one of those rooms that has multiple paths for people to group up and work on, culminating in a big reveal. That’s the way I like my rooms (uh huh, uh huh).

There were some clever tricks employed to throw you off the correct answers, not necessarily red herrings, though. Just enough to trip you up and make you second guess yourself, which we don’t see enough in rooms. (I, personally, don’t think there’s anything wrong with a full blown alternate path that leads nowhere, but that’s just me, not that that’s what this was.)

Puzzle difficulty, I would say, went from 4-9. A good range, and kinda hard.

Rating: 8.5/10

Nothing is what it appears to be… there are some curveballs thrown as you are working on the room and a few of the puzzles you have to read or look at very, very carefully or you’ll get off track.

We seemed to be really cruising through the room until our GM came in and apologized for not correctly re-setting the room because we found things earlier than we should have, which kinda threw us for a bit of a loop since we were trying to figure out how they applied. He took those items back, locked them away, and then set us back to where we should have been before we got stuck. We did have to ask for a hint at one point because we did just reach a point where we didn’t know how to proceed.

There also was a measure of difficulty to the puzzles across the room, and I will say that nothing was completely simple. We had an Escape Room Virgin (ERV) in the room with us, and we all had to work together to solve the puzzles. He had some good suggestions coming from someone who had never done a room before, so there was nothing to overthink.

Rating: 8.5/10

The other patients make the whole scenario totally believable and keep you wondering throughout what they’re going to say. The use of older-looking electronics (the clock on the wall, for instance) lend themselves very well to the aesthetics. Additionally, I felt like the tchotchkes around the room were created very carefully and are used well.

Rating: 9/10

The decoration of the room was well done and all the props fit the scene of a doctor’s office from the 60s-70s, and all of the items fit that time period as well.

The flow of the room was very well done. Multiple paths for people to work independently (or in small groups) and then coming together to do the big reveal.

The design of the room was well done too because you are fully immersed in the experience and I think my heart even jumped a bit when we found out the big reveal. That doesn’t happen a lot, so when it does, I have to call it out and appreciate it.

Rating: 9/10

Rating: ?

Rating:  3/5