The Doomsday Bomber

Review

Game Description

“The city is under siege. Citizens need help from you and your team to find the active militant known as Doomsday. Officials have zeroed in on an apartment complex centrally located within the city. On the outside, it’s an average apartment, but somewhere within its walls lies a device that has the ability to level over two square miles.

Government officials are hoping your team can infiltrate the apartment, then locate the weapon of mass destruction to disable it. You must hurry, you only have 60 minutes to stop this madman from executing his horrific plan!”

Personal Experience

We had so much fun with the Aztec Temple that we decided to do another Headcase Escape Room the next day on our Gatlinburg vacation. This time there weren’t any strangers for us to be paired with, which was actually a bit of a bummer for this room. This was a much larger and more difficult room than the Aztec Temple. While we likely could have breezed through the Temple with two, this one really needed a team of at least four. To be fair to the escape room company, they warned us ahead of time that it would be difficult for us to finish with just two, and very kindly showed us through what we missed at the end. We did pretty well considering, and made it through about 80% of the room.

Narrative

The story was a little more developed for this one than it was for the Aztec Temple. We were cast a federal agents sent to infiltrate the apartment of a mad killer known as Doomsday. There was a little more story throughout the mission, and the stakes were higher as we were attempting to find and disarm a nuclear device from leveling Gatlinburg, TN. (The most probable of nuclear targets.)

Much like Aztec Temple, clearly a lot of time and money went into the set design. The initial room was a spot-on multi-room apartment. The game is still in production, so I won’t spoil it completely, but the game definitely gets points for having one of the best scares I’ve ever had in an escape room. It featured a perfect build-up of tension that they punctured with perfect timing.

Puzzle Play

The puzzles on this were tough, and there was one in particular that I thought were a little unfair. Without saying too much, there was a puzzle that broke the fourth wall in a way that brought me out of the game and felt completely out-of-place in the narrative.

Aside from that particular one, we had a pretty good time with the puzzles that we got through. The final puzzle that we didn’t get to do looked really cool, and would be a great reward for a team that could make it that far. We needed to use a fair number of hints to get as far as we did. Part of that was due to the small size of our team, but a lot of that reflected the difficulty of the room. Like I said, tough.

Recommendation

I can only recommend this escape room conditionally. If you have a larger group comprised mainly of enthusiasts, I think you’d be in for good—if challenging—experience. If you’re a smaller team or are mostly new to escape rooms, I’d go for the Aztec Temple first.