Fairfield Escape Room - "The House on Clinton Road"

LOCATION:  Fairfield, New Jersey, USA

Photo above is property of Fairfield Escape Room

Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers

📝 ETR DECODER

🔑 GAME: The House on Clinton Road
📅 DATE PLAYED: June 5, 2024
🎬 GENRE: Thriller
🧠 DIFFICULTY (Based on 4 ppl): 5/10
👥 TOTAL # OF PLAYERS: 2-8 ppl
🕒 LENGTH OF TIME: 60 Mins.
💰 PRICE: $35.00 - $45.00/ pp (pending on group size)
☎️ BOOKING TYPE: Private
🔓 ESCAPED/ COMPLETED?: Yes [30:10]

📖 THE STORY

Hot on the trail of a serial killer responsible for several disappearances in the area, your team of officers arrives at the titular house on Clinton Road and immediately discover bloodied human remains. It’s clear that there’s a murderer nearby, but if you want to catch him, you’ll need to move quickly! You have one hour to investigate the premises, gathering the clues you need to get inside the killer’s mind and hopefully prevent him from taking another victim.

Video above is property of ESCAPETHEROOMers

🎯 HIT THE BULLSEYE

The room’s atmosphere does a great job of being creepy while still feeling safe and fun to be in. There are jump-scares and gore, but they don’t overstay their welcome or make the experience oppressive. Instead, the tone is scary in the way that a good haunted house is: you jump a bit, then have room to laugh at yourself about it and continue on with the puzzles.
Puzzle flow is excellent. There is often more than one puzzle active at a time so everyone stays busy, while at the same time each puzzle doles out enough clues to maintain the feeling of chasing a good lead. We only got stuck once (on the last puzzle), but were really satisfied when we eventually got over the hurdle!
The room has very little fat on it. Just about everything present in the room will be useful, and anything that isn’t is usually obvious and doesn’t distract from the puzzles themselves. No need to worry about red herrings or multi-use clues here!

🧩 MISSED THE MARK

A minor quibble, but after we solved the last puzzle, the timer kept running for a couple minutes while a story event played out, which made us anxious that we hadn’t finished the room yet. The staff was able to tell us our actual time, but it would have been nice for the clock to stop earlier so the group can enjoy the story event without worrying that it might be another puzzle, and so the screen displays the correct completion time at the end.
There wasn’t a good place to put things down since we were instructed not to put anything on most of the surfaces in the room. It also would have been nice to have pen and paper, though the puzzles could be completed just fine without.

🏹 TAKE A SHOT?

My team and I had a wonderful time playing “The House on Clinton Road” and in writing this review I had to get nit-picky to come up with any critiques, and all those I could think of are both highly fixable and don’t seriously detract from the game experience. Both the puzzle flow and atmosphere on display here demonstrate a high degree of polish, which makes it all the more impressive that this is Fairfield Escape Room’s very first room.

While not immensely challenging, the puzzles here are still satisfying to solve and connected together so well that my team was constantly on the move, chasing lead after lead in a way that felt like an action-packed investigation. Most puzzles weren’t extraordinarily complex, but I usually prefer a simpler puzzle with watertight logic over a multistep monstrosity that requires several big leaps in logic to solve. With a tight focus on the former option, the result here is a room that is approachable for beginners, while still plenty fun for those experienced players looking for a quality experience over raw difficulty.

All told, “The House on Clinton Road” is a strong first room for Fairfield Escape Room, and one that I would recommend for just about anyone, so long as they can handle horror as an escape room genre. At time of writing, this is the only escape experience open to the public at Fairfield Escape Room, but I will certainly be back once more are available!

ℹ️ ADDITIONAL INFO

Fairfield Escape Room is on the second floor of a business complex, accessible via stairs or an elevator.
The room requires at least one member of the group to crawl through a tight space.
The room features jump-scares and is otherwise generally creepy. The website and advertising list it as PG-13, which seems accurate given some gore and frights along the way.

Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers

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Disclosure: We thank Fairfield Escape Room for comping our tickets for this game. Although complimentary admission was generously provided, it does not impact our opinion on the review whatsoever.