Yesterday I visited Unlocked Ottawa in Kanata to try out their two escape rooms. Unlocked Ottawa is quickly expanding to be an outstanding entertainment complex, which is about to launch a Strange Happenings an outdoor escape room for fall and another indoor later this year. Within Unlocked Ottawa there is also a board game cafe, so it is the perfect place to do an escape room and then play a board game with your friends.
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The first room I did was Our Man On Sussex, where you have been ordered to search Felix Sykes apartment to discover what the spy has been up to. As part of the intelligence organization “Falcon”, you have 1 hour to sneak into the apartment and find his computer to determine what he was up to.
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The room is designed with 4-10 people and you have up to 60 minutes and 2 clues to solve the room. This room was absolutely outstanding in the design and the clues. The decor of the room realistically feels like you have entered an apartment, with all the spy tropes you would hope to find. Within the room, there is something for everyone to do, with multiple puzzles being able to be solved at the same time, instead of a very strict linear order where every clue has to be done one at a time. This allowed pairs to divide and tackle various problems within the room, which was outstanding. In the end, our team of 6 escaped with 34 minutes left on the clock!
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Directly after escaping Our Man On Sussex our team divided up for The Kyrlon Crew which is Ottawa’s only competitive escape room. In this room, the group divides into cops and robbers, and the robbers need to escape before the police who are hot on their trail arrest them. One fun thing about this room is you are in the same space, with just a chain fence diving the teams, so you can see and hear everything the other team is doing as they attempt to solve identical puzzles. This escape room is certainly fun to compete against your friends and was drastically different in terms of puzzles and decor from Our Man On Sussex. This room was a lot of fun one team could hear the answers called in for hints, so there is a need to be discrete when solving answers so the opposite team won’t discover how to solve clues.
No matter if you are trying the room with children, a group who has never done an escape room, or escape room experts like my team Unlocked Ottawa does an amazing job of scaling the difficulty of the room so it will be enjoyable for everyone. Prior to the room they will determine the scale of difficulty the group requires, and then clues within the room are switched, and at harder difficulties, even more, clues are required. This level of customization I found impressive and did result in two rooms that were the perfect level of difficulty for my team.
In addition to the escape rooms, there is also a board game lounge, which is perfect for parties or hanging out after completing an escape room. Unlocked Ottawa has a diverse range of board games, with plenty of coop strategy games for teams that want to continue to work together to solve puzzles.