It can be all too easy to forget that a great escape room can transport you as surely as prestige television, or a big budget film.
After an hour or so inside The Weeping Witch, the latest from Cross Roads Escape Games in Anaheim, you’ll be hard-pressed to forget that fact. The husband and wife designer duo of Madison and Luke Rhodes have once again created a stellar example of what escape games can be: thrilling, challenging, even a touch scary. The room is a perfect addition to Cross Roads lineup for Spooky Season, and given the Southland’s penchant for seeking out scares all year round will likely have a long run.
TWW is technically the sequel to the 2019 pop-up game experience, The Séance, which Cross Roads built in built at a different space in their facility. While that was limited to being a special event by being an actor driven experience, TWW manages to have its cake and eat it to by incorporating an actor in a way that enhances the experience but won’t be make or break on any given run.
The story of TWW goes a little something like this: you and yours have contacted a scientist who studies the occult in the hopes that his powerful technology will be able to lift the curse that has haunted your families bloodlines. He had entrusted his device to the mystic Madam Ruby, star of The Séance, who has now gone missing after the sudden appearance of the Weeping Witch: a monstrous spirit that lures her victims by the sound of, you guessed it, weeping.
With that as the setup a host of challenges await, with some of the puzzles being truly devious, requiring a keen observational eye to pick out details amidst some well executed special effects. We tackled this with the bare minimum of three players and made it out with seconds to spare, but a seasoned team of about six players (the room can accommodate up to eight) should have a good time of it.
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What makes the game stand out from the pack are the appearances of the Witch herself, which come at key dramatic moments. The story is structured so that at times it feels like you messed up and summoned the Witch, even though everything is advancing according to plan. It’s a wonderful twist to what can sometimes be rather linear progression in escape games. While fear is in the eye of the beholder, the presence of the Witch induced a touch of anxiousness as opposed to any full blown panics from our trio. You might, however, find sharing close quarters with the character a bit more unnerving. (You will not, however, be touched, at least not intentionally. If you feel someone grabbing your hand or trying to find you in the dark, that’s a teammate!)
The challenges themselves are largely non-linear, and teams can split up to take on the various parts of the room. Things are well tuned enough that it was always good to have a second or third pair of eyes to see a different angle on each puzzle. More than once our group, who had never played a room together before despite years of experience now, got the mind meld thing going. I think that’s as much a function of the Rhodes’ uncanny ability as designers to think in terms of what engenders teamwork. They used that, and its inverse, to great effect in the previous game that occupied this part of their facility, the ingenious The Psych Ward, which brought player vs. player social deduction into the challenge mix. In comparison The Weeping Witch is a more traditional escape game, if there even is such a thing as a traditional escape game, but what it lacks in twists on the form it more than makes up for in execution.
One thing I found particularly impressive was how the design of the room jump started us into problem solving mode, including a few bits of priming to draw our attention to what we could work on in a rather busy visual environment. Onboarding guests into any experience is an art form in and of itself, and the Rhodes do a really great job here with nudges subtle and not-so-subtle.
Of course, all the puzzling wouldn’t be terribly immersive if it weren’t for some stellar production design. The room reuses some of the props and scenic from The Séance and then carries that creepy curio shop vibe forward, putting in a dash of mad science while we are at it. In mere moments I was buying into the “reality” of the space, and there are enough surprises packed into this one for two rooms.
The best escape rooms strike a balance between contextual storytelling and pure challenge, and that’s exactly the sweet spot that Cross Roads hits again and again. The Weeping Witch is definitely worth a detour.
The Weeping Witch is now booking at Cross Roads Escape Games, 4245 E La Palma Ave Anaheim, CA. Tickets are $38/person with a minimum of 3 players and a maximum of 8.
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