Peanuts In My Pocket

After a two-month hiatus from playing escape rooms, we returned with a bang by tackling Cosmic Crisis at The Escape Game in the City of Orange. With this game, Flo and I have officially completed every room offered at this venue, leaving us to seek new challenges elsewhere—although there is still one room we haven’t tried at their Irvine location.

For this game, we reunited “the old team”—a group that has shared countless escape room adventures over the years. The lineup included my wife Florence, my son Michael and his wife Ari, along with Mars and Canyon. This combination has triumphed in numerous challenging rooms, proving to be a winning formula. I’m still the team’s self-proclaimed “weak link,” but as the unofficial historian, I always have a blast regardless of the outcome.

We conquered the room with 13 minutes to spare, and notably, without using a single clue. Although Cosmic Crisis is rated a 7 in difficulty, we found it surprisingly straightforward. On our personal scale, we rated it as “easy” and deemed it solvable by as few as three people. Compared to the other 12 rooms we’ve played this year, this one felt like the easiest by far.

When we say “easy,” we mean there was no ambiguity in how to navigate the room. Finding the puzzles and understanding the sequence of tasks was effortless, thanks to a helpful computer graphic that guided us through the experience. All of the puzzles followed patterns we had seen in other rooms by The Escape Game. The most challenging element—a memory-based, multi-step tactile puzzle—wasn’t overly difficult. It simply required strong communication and teamwork, which we handled with just a few minutes of focused effort.

Several puzzles required multiple people playing different roles. Based on our experience, three players seemed to be the ideal number to solve everything efficiently. It might be possible with only two players, but that would require some literal stretching to manage all the tasks.

Our post-game celebration featured backslaps and hugs over shakes and fries. Usually, we rehash the toughest puzzles, but this time there wasn’t much to dissect. It feels great to be a winner!