The Castle at Quest Factor in Seattle (formerly Conundroom Seattle) is a beautifully decorated escape room with simple puzzles.
[/media-credit] A peek into to beautifully-decorated Castle.
Story and Background
At the time of writing, The Castle is the first escape room by Quest Factor. Quest Factor was formerly known as Conundroom Seattle, but the two locations have become indepedent and the Seattle location is now known as Quest Factor. Here is the official story from the booking page:
Take part in the amazing castle experience and unlock its hidden secrets. You are a band of explorers looking to find the legendary lost treasure of the templars! You have one hour to find the treasure or the spirit of the last knight wins. Are you up for the challenge?
Quick facts:
- Location: 4140 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105 (University District)
- Players: 2-8 (we recommend 2-3)
- Price: $90 – $180 per game, depending on the size of your game.
- Duration: 60 minutes
- Overall Rating: ★★★★
Puzzle Quality
We found the puzzles a lot more straightforward than the usual escape room puzzles, especially since the room comes with text that strongly hints the right course of action.
Some of the puzzles that involved moving parts were a bit more finicky – including one of them that we needed to work in order to extract letters for a word combination lock. Some of the other puzzles that involved figuring out a combination we felt were not clued very cleanly.
Still however, the puzzles are very tactile and appropriately themed for the room.
Production Value
The decor and props in the room are the true highlights. All of the parts of the room that aren’t supposed to move are absolutely gorgeous and were hand-made in-house just for the purpose of this escape room. You can see from the picture of the room the level of detail they put into the walls, ceilings, shields, and torch holders. Some of the “artifacts” that you encounter in this game are built extremely solidly and feel like real, high-quality artifacts.
The room has some automation elements and technology that’s executed well and makes for some quite nice surprises.
The latter half of the room included a puzzle that we found incredibly fun, although the construction made it a little bit difficult to operate.
[/media-credit] Entry hall for Quest Factor
Shortcomings
As mentioned above, our main issues are the following:
- Puzzles are too straightforward after reading the text
- Some of the moving parts are either not precise enough or finicky, which makes puzzles involving them more difficult
- Some combinations are not clued very well
Overall Recommendation ★★★★
We wanted to offer a qualified recommendation for this room. It is absolutely gorgeous but the puzzles might be too simple for normal enthusiasts and not necessarily always clued in the cleanest way. The tech is great but some of the moving parts critical for the puzzles don’t always have the best precision.
This room is particularly great for certain groups that I mention below…
Couples – This seems to be one of the very few escape rooms in Seattle that offer a reasonably priced booking for 2 people (it was $90 when we booked it for two, although apparently the full price is $120). It’s quite rare to find an escape room in the United States that has this kind of small-group-friendly booking scheme, and especially an escape room that welcomes groups of 2. Groups of 3 work here too.
Small Private Groups – Along the same lines as above, Quest Factor is one of the few rooms in Seattle that offer private bookings with reasonable prices for small teams. In addition to being good for couples, this is also good for families, small groups of friends, or any other situation where you don’t want to be paired up with strangers.
Escape Room Novices – This is a great, clean introduction to escape rooms for those who aren’t familiar with the genre. It’s a gentle, light introduction to a lot of the key features of escape rooms, including a 1) well-executed theme 2) padlocks and wordlocks 3) additional areas 4) decoding symbols 5) figuring out what to do after reading a passage.
This game made it onto our Top Escape Rooms in Seattle list.
Book your game at questfactor.us and let your hosts know that “EscapeRoomTips.com” sent you!
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