Review: Jewel of the Sea, Intrepid Escape Rooms, Orange Co. Calif.
Fun Factor 8
Intrepid Escape Rooms
1622 Edinger Ave, Suite C, Tustin, CA 92780
Date we played: January 9, 2025
Booking size 2 to 8; We recommend 3 to 4
Game time: 60 minutes
Objective: Travel to Barbados and explore the ship Jewel of the Sea. Investigate and search the ship… Is there still treasure?
Horror Theme: No.
Difficulty: Intermediate
We highly recommend the “Jewel of the Sea” room at Intrepid Escape Rooms in Tustin, California. Tustin is part of Orange County, just south of Los Angeles. We thoroughly enjoyed this room as it offers a wealth of puzzle content with diverse solving methods, extensive hands-on exploration of the set and props, and an overall immersive adventure.
This is a good representation of the “treasure at sea” motif! One of the top escape room themes.
Intrepid Escape Rooms goes the extra mile by having a dedicated game host for each room, who is in costume and character, and is only looking after your group. The game host does not enter the room with you but welcomes you aboard a train to begin your adventure. While most American escape rooms provide a briefing in a hallway or at the door, Intrepid Escape Rooms has designed a briefing area that resembles a classic passenger railcar where you'll watch the scenery shift through the window; for each escape room, you'll see a different scene. We truly appreciated the enhanced experience of being sent on our way.
Regular readers of Fun Factor Escape Room Reviews will know that we also value imaginative and immersive hint systems - in the case of the Jewel of the Sea room, your in-game hints will be delivered by an animatronic talking pirate. The bird serves not only as the hint system but also provides content and is essential to a particularly fun puzzle.
Fun pre-game start!
Your group boards a “train” that takes you to the starting point of your specific escape room. Listen to the game guide as the scenery unfolds before you! You will see something different for each room.
Clues and content from a Parrot!
FUN!
The set is very compact - good use is made of this small footprint; but even though groups of up to 8 can be accommodated, we recommend three to four as the ideal number for the size of the space and puzzle mechanics.
Most of the puzzles did a pretty good of fitting into the scenario - but one in particular required a bit of physical dexterity that overstayed its welcome. The scope of the prop piece is impressive and initially was very fun, despite being a puzzle that just seemed to be here because we were in an escape room - I think it could have been in any themed escape room. While we initially had fun with this challenge, we believe that it took an outsized use of our time.
The set is compact but makes good use of the space. We particularly enjoyed a transition to a new space where Intrepid Escape Rooms considered this transition in the art direction for the new space when many set decorators would not have added the detail.
We especially enjoy escape rooms that involve a lot of tactile manipulation and engage multiple senses, so we appreciated the variety of puzzle types. There were a couple of “repurpose” puzzles, which we particularly enjoyed as they are the most immersive type of puzzle - in that you are not merely solving a puzzle created for the escape room but are using props organically.
We recommend the Jewel of the Sea for experienced enthusiasts, but we also believe this experience is a good choice for those new to escape rooms and looking for an engaging introduction to the fun.
Intrepid Escape Rooms has plenty of parking as it is in an office/retail park with a dedicated parking lot. We played all three of the escape rooms open at the time of our visit, and we recommend all of them. Future reviews will cover The Stolen Relic and Haunted Terminal. All of the game guides we met were friendly and enthusiastic and added to our fun.