The year is 1913, and you and your friends have been invited to a fancy health retreat run by a mysterious doctor. Right after meeting him, you find yourself locked in his office with no way out and an overwhelming feeling of bad vibes. Can you escape in time, or will you be another test subject for Dr. Gravely’s immoral experiments? That’s the question posed by Escape The Room: Secret of Dr. Gravely’s Retreat.
An at-home escape room for a group of three to eight players, Dr. Gravely’s Retreat is a night’s worth of puzzles in one box. To get started, all you need to do is open up the box and read the basic rules. Once ready, start a timer for an hour and a half and see how far you and your friends can get.
Puzzles in Dr. Gravely’s Retreat range from incredibly basic to very challenging and creative. Our group of four players typically solved puzzles in a few minutes, but some lasted much longer. While the puzzles come in different styles, like word puzzles, number puzzles and puzzles with pictures, they all come down to assigning symbol to four colors. It’s a smart way to include a variety of puzzle types with similarly structured answers.
The one feature Dr. Gravely’s Retreat had over other at-home escape rooms I’ve tried is a solution wheel. This creative disc had a number of dials to spin on it, giving players the option to line up puzzle results. If you have the right answer to a puzzle, the wheel will let you know it’s time to move onto the next one. It’s a simple and fast way to make sure you’re on track when solving the different puzzles, and it’s a smart way to include all answers on one easy-to-use device.
Because all of the puzzles end up with similar results, there isn’t as much exploring and physical work to do. Whereas games like Escape Room In A Box: The Werewolf Experiment gives more of that real-world escape room experience with props and things to explore, Dr. Gravely’s Retreat is much more 2D. Puzzles typically are done with pencil and paper, with the occasional cardboard cutout. This works, but we never had a truly “wow” experience, like we did solving some puzzles in The Werewolf Experiment.
Dr. Gravely’s Retreat can be reset to allow for multiple playthroughs, but our group found ourselves making notes on the papers and generally wrecking the game by the time we had finished. Some may feel like it’s a ripoff to only get to use the escape room once, but it’s comparatively a pretty solid deal. Considering the price of movie tickets, or even a real escape room, the $20 or so needed to play through Dr. Gravely’s Retreat is a pretty decent value.
Overall, our group said they had a lot of fun with Dr. Gravely’s Retreat. I do wish it had more of the physical elements from The Werewolf Experiment, but I feel Dr. Gravely’s Retreat had puzzles that better fit the story. If you’re looking for a more traditional puzzle experience, give Dr. Gravely’s Retreat a try. If you want more of that physical escape room feel, look elsewhere.
Escape The Room: Secret of Dr. Gravely’s Retreat is now available online.
So what do you think? Are you interested in trying Secret of Dr. Gravely’s Retreat for yourself? Have you played any other at-home escape rooms? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
