When it was announced that Universal Orlando Resort’s newest attraction would be opening its doors whilst I was in town, I knew we’d have to give it a go! Universal’s Great Movie Escape is a first-of-its-kind escape room style experience marketed as ‘not just an escape room, an escape adventure’. The attraction offers two different rooms themed to two of Universal’s most popular properties: Jurassic World and Back to the Future. We managed to snag some matinee tickets for Jurassic World Escape on the attraction’s opening day! With that in mind, it’s worth considering that elements of the experience may be tweaked or fine-tuned by the park post-opening, but I’m going to run through my full experience at the attraction, whilst staying as spoiler free as possible.
At my time of booking ticket prices varied by time and day, with our 16:30 weekday tickets setting me back $53.24 (with tax) per person. This was for a non-exclusive experience, meaning we would be grouped with strangers to experience the room.
Guests are requested on their ticket to arrive at the venue in City Walk 15 minutes early, and – in the small print – that valid photo ID is required. Do not follow in my footsteps and completely miss this part! We managed to blag it with a photo of my passport thankfully, but make sure you’ve got yours to hand to avoid the stress. It was the first time I’ve ever been asked to provide ID to use an E-Ticket so I hadn’t even thought to check – oops! Always read the small print! But anyway, after checking in at the requested time, we were asked to wait in the bar area for a briefing, ready to enter our room at our allotted time. But as our 16:30 time slot rolled around, we’d heard nothing more from anyone so wandered toward what we assumed to be the briefing area and stood awkwardly around for a moment before being escorted in and shown a pre-recorded safety message (similar to most rides in the theme park, no pregnant, smoke-sensitive or other medically vulnerable people). After this we were told we wouldn’t actually be going into the room for another fifteen minutes, so to return to the bar again and prepare to be in the room for a full hour. So, we pulled up the same chairs and sat and waited for another fifteen minutes. It’s absolutely on me for booking the matinee time to save a few bucks, but it kinda sucked to unneccesarily waste a solid half-hour of time I could have been in the park. There were two bars in the lounge area, serving custom cocktails, mocktails and standard bar offerings. Having not brought our ID, we didn’t even try to order any of these sadly. But kudos to them for the specialty drinks. This is clearly how you are supposed to spend the wait – oops again! As well as special drinks, the attraction also had its own exclusive merchandise available for purchase, focusing on the overall attraction rather than individual mazes, but with a design that was right up my street.
When it was finally time to enter the room, we wandered upstairs to Jurassic World Escape and scanned in our tickets ready to enter. Alongside my partner and I, the group consisted of two other couples. I won’t lie, it was awkward. Despite being told a few times that we were all best friends now, no one said a word to one another until the puzzles began. Definitely a bit of a strange vibe, but one that can be instantly overcome by simply having enough friends and family to visit with – or having the $300 for a private room!
So into the first room we ventured. This first space was the white laboratory room featured in the promotional photos. Here we were introduced to our video guide who would be taking us through the experience, and who set us our first challenge. This DNA matching exercise was essentially a game of pairs. It was extremely simple. It also went on for a very long time. Whilst the system for the game looked great and was fun to use, it was obvious the whole group was getting tired of playing by the end. There was an audible sigh of relief when our guide announced that we’d matched enough pairs! The guide also said at this point to ensure we remembered how base pair matching worked, as it would come up later… except it never did. Odd.
One thing I was very impressed by in the first room was that the challenge included various different interactive stations and the audio actively encouraged us to move around to ensure that everyone got a turn. I had been worried that in sharing the experience with strangers, it was liable to be hijacked by more confident members of the group, but this seemed a good sign that the rooms had been designed to combat this! The challenge itself was also designed to encourage teamwork and communication in a way that other escape rooms often fail to accomplish.
From here we moved through a further six challenges of varying difficulty. These ranged from as simple as being verbally instructed to type in a number and… typing it in, up to more traditional escape room fare involving the (still not particularly challenging) retrieval and entry of data from around the room.
After a promising start, the sharing of work became less fair as the room proceeded. No more were we encouraged to share tasks, instead in one particularly sad example myself and another woman ended up simply turning a crank for the entire duration of the challenge whilst everyone else got on with the puzzling. Essential to the task, but nonetheless obviously designed just to give a menial job to spare people.
I don’t want to drop any true spoilers so I won’t go into depth about the puzzles themselves, but I do need to talk about one thing that I really did not appreciate at all: being moved on. Now, I understand that this is not a traditional escape room, so the standard rules do not apply. But on two occasions within the room, tasks were ‘completed’ early, in order to move us on before we had finished. Twice we were very clearly still mid-puzzle when the video guide appeared onscreen to congratulate and move us to the next room. With no option to return to previous rooms here, this meant an unavoidably expedited journey through the attraction. I appreciate that in this story-based experience they want to ensure you have time to complete everything, but we exited the attraction having been in the actual room for a little under 45 minutes. To have our hour-long experience shortened by a quarter not due to our own skills, but due to simply being made to move on left a bit of a sour taste. Not just that, but it made the whole thing feel a little futile. In a regular escape room, there is no guarantee that you will ‘escape’. I mean, sure you’ll be allowed out of the room after an hour, but will the puzzle be solved? Not necessarily. Here, by being moved on suddenly, instead of being a necessity the puzzles felt like a time killer. Just something to entertain you whilst you wait to experience the next part of the story.
But honestly, none of that was why I was there. The challenge never truly mattered to me anyway. I wasn’t here for a puzzle, I was here for theming. So does it live up to expectations in that regard? Well, yes and no. I’m happy to say that the photo shared with the media of the white laboratory room was probably the least themed within the Escape. There were two rooms within the experience that did truly impress me, creating particularly believable Jurassic environments.
I was just disappointed that there was no wow moment for me. The majority of the dinosaur action is audio-based – at times I felt like I was in a Darkfield attraction – which whilst this worked well (it genuinely made me uneasy once or twice) felt like a little bit of a cop out. There were a handful of screen-based moments that I really enjoyed – particularly in the second puzzle – but I would have liked to see more of these ancient beasts we love so much!
I just never found myself thinking ‘you crazy son of a bitch, you did it’, instead I kept waiting for something, some sort of major set piece or animatronic that would make me feel like I was at an attraction I couldn’t experience anywhere else in the world. Whilst Christopher Lloyd is said to have returned for OUTATIME, the Back to the Future room, film characters only receive name checks here. Even the finale, whilst very cool, wasn’t a whole world away from elements of Black Mirror Labyrinth back at the UK’s Thorpe Park. If you’ve been lucky enough to experience the incredible Jurassic World: VelociCoaster, know that the queue line for that ride is more thematically impressive than this attraction in my opinion. Maybe my expectations were too high? Feel free to destroy my naivety in the comments. I truly thought that this attraction would elevate the genre and rewrite my understanding of the escape room. In my experience, it was an immersive, interactive attraction that focused more on the use of IP than the puzzle experience.
Despite what feels like an Indominous Rex-sized outpouring of negativity, I did very much enjoy my time in Jurassic World Escape. There were dinosaurs, there were games and there was immersive design – a good experience by any measure! And as mentioned before, this was my opening day experience. I bet that by the time this has even been published, the arrival procedure has already been tightened up and hopefully, the teams are learning how to balance guest ability with need to proceed through the story. Universal’s Great Movie Escape is undoubtedly an enjoyable, and not overly expensive (by Orlando standards) add-on to a trip to Universal Orlando Resort, making it a no-brainer for fans of either franchise. Personally, I’d recommend booking an evening slot with the biggest group (up to 8) you can, having a few cocktails and enjoying a fun, unique, themed evening with friends.
With much having been said about the adaptability of these mazes, I’m very much looking forward to seeing how they develop in the future.
For now however, I’m OUTATIME.
Speak again soon,
Claire
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coasterclaire.co.uk 