St Louis Escape

I have been here several times for both the escape rooms and the mini golf. Hands down one of the best black light arcade themed mini golf that's indoor in STL! The escape rooms are of very high quality but I can't be the only one that thinks the difficulty is significantly higher than posted. Trying to figure out the process of what you are looking for in clues to get a code is not clear whatsoever. You'll be guessing what you are trying to solve for and have to ask for help to get started in the right direction. The quality and amount of build in these rooms is extremely high! They are very impressive with the level of interaction. I definitely would start with the easiest rooms they offer for the best experience.

We came here for a birthday celebration and it was awesome. In my opinion, this was maybe the second best miniature golf course I've been on, with the first being Twilight Zone in Las Vegas. It has a wonderful assortment of creative puzzles for you to shoot your ball through and the black light visuals are stunning. I didn't do the escape rooms, so I can't speak to those, but this place is awesome for a chill night of recreation.

I was part of a party that recently did the Oz escape room. We had a frustrating experience. We had correctly figured out a code, but when entering it through a sequence of buttons the machinery didn't work correctly. This caused us to think we had it wrong. We asked the game master for help but they didn't seem to be paying attention at all, despite one of our group summarizing our thoughts and progress so far. They gave us clues to things we had already figured out! I also know that they weren't paying attention because if they had been, then on one of the multiple correct attempts to press the buttons they could have easily interceded and told us we had it right but needed to go slower or whatever. It cost us 15 minutes of game time up front and really soured the rest of the experience. All that being said, that's not what drove me to actually write the review. I was content to let another member of our party write the negative review as feedback to the management. Except that the manager/owner then gave a nasty response on here. Looking through other negative reviews, it's clear that this type of vitriolic response to negative reviews is a pattern of behavior. So what I really wanted to say is this: it's critically important to any business to both learn to receive and use negative feedback, but also to be able to deal with public negative criticism constructively. Snapping back and arguing gets you nowhere *even if you're right* (which you're not, in this case). I understand that in the internet age, negative reviews can damage or ruin a business. But understand that plenty of businesses flush with positive reviews go out of business as well. Do you think that arguing and fighting with us on social media will make us want to return, or spread positive word of mouth? All the positive reviews in the world won't save you if you don't get enough return customers. Whether you think that our criticism is fair or not, we are not complainers who write 1 star reviews at the drop of a hat. We are trying to inform you of a real negative experience we had so that you can learn from it and improve the customer experience in the future. If we'd simply been told a sincere form of "sorry about that, we'll try to figure out ways to make that less frustrating in the future" we would have likely returned at some future date. As it is now, I question if we would even be welcome on the premises. Is that how you want your customers to feel?