Psycho Escape Room Delightfully Puzzling

You’ve been abducted by The Psycho, a notorious serial killer. He’s locked you in one of his kill rooms. He’s given you 45 minutes to try and escape. Figure out the clues and live. Fail and die.

We died.

I may have helped kill us by accidentally keeping a clue in my hand. (spoiler alert)

The Psycho escape room in Los Angeles is a fun, horror-themed trap that forces you to work together solving puzzles, connecting dots, and making (not too outrageous) leaps of logic in order to open the door to freedom.

This seems very innocent…

After getting a standard talking-to about what we can and can’t do in the room and signing a waiver, we were led down a dark hallway to the door. We locked our phones and other personal items into a box (we still had the box inside with us, it was just to make sure our phones and such were not used), and after the general manager Brian (full disclosure: he’s a friend of mine) wished us luck, the door was locked.

There are secret rooms, hidden clues, locks, puzzles, cameras, and computers; so many different things to connect and work with! However, not all of them are important. There are a few red herrings to distract and throw you off the track. It’s going to really help if you can get a group of your friends together rather than doing this kind of cooperation with perfect strangers.

Nap time!

I really only have two issues with our experience: I felt that there wasn’t strong enough of a horror theme to this room. It was a little too clean, neat, and un-bloody, as compared to other rooms I’ve done. The introductory video that started our countdown was kind of generic and not very threatening at all. Even though there were occasional sounds and thumps from various locations in the room, simulating the imminent return of the killer, I never felt it was enough.

The other issue is with the clues themselves. I think they are a very solvable series of clues, and the difficulty level is not very high, but (without spoiling much) they are sometimes hard to “read” due to wear and tear from being used many times before.

This means something. Or not.

But maybe I’m just making excuses for our failure at escaping. After Brian explained the solution(s), we felt a little foolish about our misinterpretation of some things that got us very very close to escaping (along with the afore-mentioned clue flub by yours truly)…but close isn’t enough. We’re dead. Evidence below.

Fail

There are two other rooms at Countdown: a spaceship and a tiki hut, and we were allowed to peek into them. The theming to them is great and they promise to be a fun time for non-horror fans (but what are non-horror fans doing on this site? hahaha).