Review: The Great Room, 13th Hour Escape Rooms, Wharton, NJ
Fun Factor 7
13th Hour Escape Rooms
105 West Dewey Ave, Wharton NJ 07885
Date we played was October 20, 2024
Booking size 2 to 10; We recommend 3 to 5
Game time: 60 minutes
Objective: Discover terrible secrets of the Hayden family as you explore this part of their farmhouse and make it out alive!
Difficulty: Intermediate
We recommend The Great Room by 13th Hour Escape Rooms as we had fun playing this room! The FUN FACTOR rating is 7. We recommend this room for the set, which has an authentic spooky vibe, and for the puzzles, which are well embedded into the set and varied. We also appreciated the welcoming customer service which positively impacted our fun!
We did not play this room in time for our 2024 3-part series of Halloween-appropriate escape rooms, so we are including this as a stand-alone review. Keep in mind that in addition to several spooky Halloween-season-appropriate escape rooms, 13th Hour also operates a haunted house…which, if the huge lines are any indication, must be the place to go during Halloween. We played 4 escape rooms here, and when we finished our last room at about 9 PM, the huge parking lot was quite full and brimming with excitement.
We were told The Great Room was 9 years old at the time of our visit…so it definitely has the vibe of an early escape room and does not have the technology interfaces of 13th Hour Escape Rooms’ newer rooms. Importantly, the room and props are not showing problematic signs of wear for the most part.
You will start in The Great Room itself - an immersive 2-level room appropriately decorated for the theme. You will not be able to go up to the second level of this room, but what you see up there is certainly important and worthy of a second look.
The puzzling is varied, and the solutions are clear. Like all of the rooms we played at 13th Hour Escape Rooms, scavenging skills come to into play. Not always finding props or pieces but finding information that 13th Hour Escape Rooms has scattered throughout its set. I am the first to admit that scavenging is not a skill I excel at!
This room has a spooky vibe, to be sure - we did not find it scary. But if you play in this room at 6 PM or later during the Halloween season…in that case, you will be treated to the bonus of meeting a resident (an actor in costume and make-up) to make your visit scarier and to add a further element of interaction.
The objective - according to the description on the website - is to uncover the secrets and save ourselves. I mention the website - as for this and the other 3 rooms we played here, we were not briefed on the scenario or the objective before we started - as is industry standard. Instead, the host opened the door for us, and we found the timer had started as soon as it closed. We would have preferred a few minutes of stage-setting and background to help us get into the immersive experience.
The other area where 13th Hour has room to improve is the flashlight situation. Effective lighting in escape rooms is a pet issue for Fun Factor Escape Room Reviews. They did provide an adequate number of mini-flashlights (smaller than a lighter) for the group to find and use - but we have never been given these before in an escape room as they are not really fun to use - as you have to hold down the button for the light since it goes out when you lift your finger and it doesn’t really provide much light. They did freely allow us to use our cell phones, but after playing many rooms here, our batteries were dying. We would have had more fun exploring the house with proper flashlights.
An area where 13th Hour unequivocally excels is customer service! All of the folks we met were friendly and personal and made clear that we were welcome. We had many game hosts over our four rooms - I can recall Brandon, Gabriel and Chase and they were terrific!
