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We recently tried the escape room by the company ClockWise
Escape Room. This is only the second escape room I’ve ever done, but it was
substantially more fun compared to the far too difficult escape room that we
did at Palace Games (in Palace of Fine Arts, also in San Francisco). I consider myself novice to the realm of
escape rooms, and so ClockWise was a much more appropriate escape room for my
level.
ClockWise Escape Room is located on Market Street, in Mid-Market
of San Francisco. Directly across the street is Civic Center and Tenderloin.
For me, both neighborhoods are sketchy, with the Tenderloin being the worst
where the sidewalks are lined with homeless and the air smells like urine. Step
carefully to avoid needles and poop. The building itself is a bunch of
buildings, where the main entrance serves several other rooms not related to
ClockWise. That being said, finding the actual room is easy and on the
weekends, there was plenty of street parking.
Cost
The upside to less than desirable location of ClockWise is
that the price of the escape room per person is fairly affordable, at ~$25 per
person (as of Oct 2018). You’ll still have to take parking into consideration,
unless you’re taking Uber. But street parking is only around $3-$4 per hour.
The rooms can hold up to 10 people at a time and you have an hour to solve the
room.
Rooms
We ended up doing “Party in Vegas”, where the theme is Las
Vegas. The escape room is well decorated (though I have the say the decorations
in Palace Games was top-notch as it gets). Part of what makes this escape room
a >50% escape rate is that the game is very linear, as they explain in the
introduction. Once a piece of the puzzle is used, it can essentially be ignored
the rest of the time.
There are security cameras that cover every corner of the
room with speakers. When you have a question, simply wave at any of the cameras
and they can alert you. If you need a time check, do the same thing and ask for
a time-check. They attentively monitor the room and are very quick to answer
anytime we alerted them through the cameras.
Overall Review
Overall, I give ClockWise 5 Star rating. I would definitely
recommend beginners try Party in Vegas while they have three other moderate
difficulty rooms that have a lower escape rate. The weekends are easier for
bunch of friends to go, but the weekdays would make for a great team building
event.