Saturday, 19 January 2019

A Midnight Visit - Review



Hi everyone

My team went to check out A Midnight Visit back in October.  I was really excited to check out A Midnight Visit, as some of the best escape room (or escape room like) experiences I have been to have involved live actors in the space.  The one that comes to mind as my fave live actor experience was Monroe & Associates (which toured in Sydney in January 2018).

A Midnight Visit is an interactive experience, based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe.  It was our 103rd “escape room” experience.

Firstly, I should make it very clear to those reading this review that A Midnight Visit is not an escape room.  In fact, it is nothing really at all like an escape room.  It is much more akin to interactive performance art, with various actors playing roles throughout many different spaces/scenes.

I found much of the scenery and theming was really well done.  The space looked cool and every prop was appropriate (and in some cases, very detailed). 

However, beyond that, honestly, I didn’t enjoy the experience.  My main bug bear with the experience was that there were simply too many people.  We must have had at least 80 people in our group – it was standing room only.  What annoyed me about this is that nowhere on their website do they disclose the number of people in each group.  I expected there would be maybe 20 or so people, so when I saw 80 I was just annoyed.  This volume of people greatly affected our experience.  As many of the scenes within the experience were quite small, we had to wait in long queues to get into most areas.  

There was only one escape room style puzzle in the experience that we managed to find.  It was an excellent puzzle (no doubt designed by our friends at The Cipher Room).  Unfortunately, the puzzle had been solved (and left in the solved position) by the time we managed to fight the queue into that particular room.  I found that REALLY disappointing.

There were some fun elements and great theming, but overall I found myself not really getting into the performance art.  Parts were interesting but it just wasn’t for me.

Where:                                    655 King Street, Newtown

Duration:                                60-80 minutes

Themes:                                  1 theme

Cost:                                        $64pp

Overall Summary:                  More theatre than escape room and WAY too many people

More details:                          https://amidnightvisit.com/

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