"I solved it!"

"What did you do?"

"I have no idea!"

overview

Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock this crazy adventure is a fabulous trip through time. The crazy timekeeper has been stuck in a time warp and needs our help to get things back on track. This time loop is for 10 players. An award-winning escape room - think you can escape in TIME?

This is award winning?

The Clock Tower's story seems interesting at first glance. Make sure you remember it well, because absolutely none of that plays into the actual game. This is an escape room. I think. 

When I first walked into this game, I got excited. This looked like it could turn into something really special. Maybe the mixed reviews were wrong. Maybe people didn't appreciate this place for what it was. Maybe behind all the crowded alleys and entertainment competition, there was a truly special game inside these walls. 

Nope. It's a bad game. 

quick stats

gameplay time: 60 minutes

recommended team size: 3-4 players

difficulty: 4/5

scare level: 0.5/5

location: Boston, MA

website: https://escapetheroom.com/boston/

considerations: -have a tallish person on your team -low lighting conditions with no provided flashlight (bring a phone, thank me later)

scenery

Clock Tower looks quite nice. Spanning 3 rooms, the steampunk vibes carry throughout, and it looks very well done. The second room is the best looking room of them all, but the third is close behind. 

The walls are covered in dirty bricks, and there's all sorts of steampunk levers and switches and machines. It looks nice. It's not quite as good as some of the other games in Boston, but it's way better than I would have expected for a room of this quality. 

Escape The Room is a chain company, and from the images I've seen, the build quality is usually quite good for their games. There's not much to say other than that. The set looks pretty and the numerous clocks are probably the standout of the game, as they all look cool and fancy. The game looks cool. 

puzzles

Oh boy. Here we go. 

This game broke my win streak, and I'm not at all disappointed in myself. These puzzles made no sense and were incredibly illogical. The logic leaps were some of the biggest I've ever seen in a game, and there were numerous times we had to get multiple hints before taking an action that in any other situation would be completely wrong and destroy the set. And it wasn't even a cool interaction. 

One early moment in the game had us setting times on three different clocks (mind you, they were extremely temperamental, and we thought one of them was completely broken). However, we had about four different times to put on these three clocks. Instead of logically connecting a certain time to a certain clock, you just have to trial and error your way through the whole room until something happens. I said "wow, this is a bad game" out loud within the first 5 minutes of the game. 

Lots of tech in the game didn't work without extreme fiddling. Some lights were broken. The worst part was the amount of times in this game that you have to unscrew something or pull off something that looks very not part of the game. One of these objects had a "NOT PART OF PUZZLE" sticker directly next to it. 

I don't understand how someone could design these puzzles, walk through them, and say, "Yeah, this makes sense."

pros and cons

pro: cool looking set. 

con: some of the most illogical puzzles I've ever seen. 

pro: one puzzle at the beginning involving a bunch of switches was actually a lot of fun. It was really surprising to see a very fun puzzle in the midst of awful ones. 

con: a little part of the room near the entrance is very dark. And you need to see in there. And they don't provide flashlights. Bring a phone. 

con: multiple puzzles will make you feel like you're gonna break something. And you could easily break something for real in this game, so you're gonna have to ask for permission, probably. 

con: faulty tech. 

con: there is no music in there. It's absolutely silent. I hate it. 

overall

Despite the mixed reviews, I had hope that this game would be really good. Clock Tower looks like it could be a really cool game, but it's just not. If this had a total makeover, maybe redesigned by Boxaroo, this could turn into a really great game. Unfortunately, the puzzles are so lackluster and illogical that it ruins the experience. 

I really wanted to love this game, but it just wasn't fun to play. After about 10 minutes in, it felt like we were playing something in a friend's basement, and we honestly stopped focusing on the game and just casually played through it while chatting with each other. The fact that the game couldn't capture my interest enough, to the point where I didn't even care about finishing, perfectly captures how this game made me feel. 

rating

3/10