I am back! Travelling again! And I am travelling back to RECOOONNN! Or rather, the Reality Escape Convention! This year it is in Los Angeles, one of the hubs of top tier escape rooms!

I am super excited to experience all that LA has to offer and, of course, shall chronicle my journey as best we can between jet lagged sleeps.

Hair Status: Crazy Cat Lady

I know it’s hard to imagine, but waking up early and travelling through 2 airports over several hours and following it up with hotel check-ins and escape rooms left my hair a little…fly away.

I forgot to take a pic but this trip promises to be another horrific hair adventure. Not least of which because I brought no product with me again because of my paranoia of airport security arresting me.

Doesn’t help that I am in LA, the land of beautifully coiffed people…ah well. But who knows…with LA having no humidity, maybe it will survive!

LA Stuff

LA is…sprawling… it’s anxiety inducing.

But, also, there are many palm trees! I was way too excited about the palm trees.

I was told I had to have Mexican food. And I did! We went to a place called Somos Oaxaca, and it was….so good. I had enchiladas in mole sauce, which I never tried before, as well as a spicy cucumber margarita, which I am still having dreams about.

There are other things to say about LA, but for now let’s move on to…

RECON

Although the con didn’t properly start until Sunday, Saturday was a check-in day and of course people.had been congregating days before hand for some pre-con fun I am having FOMO about.

The second I got to the hotel…it was a barrage. People I knew, some I had met in person, some not, all milling around. I am pretty sure I seemed extra manic trying to keep up saying hello to everyone.

I was especially excited to meet my friends Lee-fay and Sim in person. We formed an online escape team during the pandemic called Team Muppet and they helped get me through some really tough isolation.

This year I will also be a volunteer for RECON! I hope I don’t lead people astray…

The con promises to be a rollicking good time.

I was exhausted and jet lagged. That didn’t stop me sneaking in a couple of escapes though…

The Escapes

Okay now for the good stuff! I feel like those recipe blogs that make you read through their life story before getting to the actual recipe. IT’S SO ANNOYING. Nevertheless…here I am.

We did two escapes for our first day in LA. First up was Hatch Escape’s The Ladder.

The Ladder

This was a really interesting room. People who I had talked to who had played it seemed to love it. I was walking in fairly blind. I didn’t even read the blurb on the website!

Hatch Escapes is located in a warehouse building, much of which seems to be unairconditioned, but not to an unbearable degree. The hosts were super nice and patient with us, and even up for making other escape recommendations while we were here!

Over a 90 minute play time, the Ladder takes place over 5 decades, with each room representing a different decade starting with the 1950s. It has multiple puzzle paths, multiple choices, and multiple endings, advertising itself as a replayable experience.

Our first playthrough (I do indeed have a second booking!) was, to put it mildly, a complete failure. With two of us jetlagged and already susceptible to being overwhelmed with lots of information , we were a disorganized mess. I might have sworn a lot and let my despair of not knowing what to do show too much. I got the sense that the Ladder does expect players to fail their first time around, but…I felt like we were another level. We got the worst possible ending, though it was presented in a humorous way.

I did love the aesthetic and set design, which captured every era perfectly. The tasks we had to do perfectly fit the role we were assigned. The acting present in the room was fantastic. The mechanics between each decade were wonderfully varied. We were simply way too unfocused to be any sort of effective in the room. I do have it booked for a second playthrough so let’s see how that goes!

Next up was…

Escape From Godot- Mister and Mischief

Escape From Godot is an immersive theatre experience with escape room elements that centres around a “terrible” production of “Waiting for Godot”. The audience’s job is simply to support their “friend” performing and help out with the show before Samuel Beckett’s famously restrictive estate shuts it down.

If you are a fan of theatre and know Waiting for Godot, you will love this experience. If you don’t, you will still enjoy but probably wonder why that weird, frizzy haired theatre nerd is laughing so hard. The actors do a wonderful job performing a play on stage and managing to ignore the chaos around them. The show is just near enough to being a Waiting for Godot production without bringing down the hammer of the Beckett estate.

The way the actors and the show allowed the audience to interact and solve puzzles was just so fun. They managed to give each of us a moment to be in the “spotlight” without going against anyone’s comfort levels. We had a blast exploring the theatre and making the show our own!

I am rushing to finish this before RECON proper begins. I might have more thoughts later! Here we go!