High School Never Really Ends – Midnight on the Bayou Escape Room Review

Chances are high school greatly affected your life, and apparently after your afterlife – Midnight on the Bayou Escape Room Review

Ah, high school. The most definitive experience of our categorized teenage years. What other time in our lives are we more confused, more hormonal, and more susceptible to our peers is there? I mean there’s college, but people are usually considered adults at the time. I mean in the sense of their age, their opinions don’t count until about age 24. But, let’s step away from politics and go back to high school where social politics ruled the land. Were you popular? Maybe you were a jock or nerd. You might have been your own person that people respected, or maybe a social outcast. No matter who or what you were, chances are it affects your life until this day. Or, in the case of the students of Bayou High, your after life as well.

The Midnight on the Bayou escape room is Red Lantern Escape Rooms‘ 1000 square feet haunted high school reunion escape room experience from limbo. I know limbo is less scary than hell, but I’m trying to be accurate. You see, what had happened was, during your time at Bayou High, several decades ago, some of your class mates tragically burned to death in a barn fire. Now at your decades later carnival themed high school reunion where your fellow classmates died, things don’t go quite as planned. You and some fellow alumni find it odd that there are no carnival workers at this carnival. There’s also no one else there minus you and your group of friends. There’s only the ethereal reunion host, who you don’t remember going to school with, and he keeps nervously looking at that creepy old chest…

You look at the chest and that’s when it begins! You are now trapped in between the world of the living and the dead, and the only way to survive and return to the world of the living is the help those who are not. You have one hour, 1000 sqr-ft, and up to 11 others to help you escape- 12 if you count the reunion host who somehow isn’t freaking out and is kind of hoping you don’t return to the living world because the venue is over booked (I inferred this motive, no actual evidence).

Red Lantern Escape Rooms provides one of the most encompassing escape room experiences available. Rich back story, large and fully immersive environment, sinister yet helpful actors, and some down right difficult puzzles that greatly reflect the scenario and situation. Red Lantern Escape Rooms begin the experience as soon as you finish paperwork signing process. You and your group are brought into a plush and comfortable themed, or just classically decorated, lounge area where you are regaled the tale of the tragic loss of your classmates. Simultaneously, you are trying to figure out some near impossible wood puzzle to earn yourself some hints. Even with a hint about the wood puzzle, it’s still extremely difficult. (We did not earn the hint).

Then we were brought into the Midnight on the Bayou Escape Room. We were given a good- perfect- amount of time to just take in the masterfully crafted escape room. During the time, the environment really encompasses you into the scenery and really create the right sense of skepticism and urgency. After the experience envelops you and your group, you are guided to the chest that starts the chain events of puzzle solving and secret finding to save your metaphorical life.

The puzzles in the Midnight on the Bayou Escape Room are among some of the most challenging I have experienced. What I enjoyed the most about the puzzles, is that they feel completely organic to the experience. It’s not one of those escape rooms where all the puzzles lead to a word or letter. Not that those types of puzzles aren’t fun and can be organic in their own right, but sometimes it removes you from the immersion to do a puzzle that results in giving you a single letter. The puzzles here are all embedded into the environment and props and feel like a real treasure hunt. Not to say there are not puzzles that end in words, but it feels completely organic, in a National Treasure sort of way. The best part about this, your own natural instincts and curiosity can allow you to stumble onto clues on your own. This especially applies to myself, because I’m the type to check for secret passages and stuff in every escape room; often times I think the escape room is far more complex than it really is, which leads to a lot of time wasting and leaving my color blind friend to deal with a rainbow binder situation (this happened in our very first escape room). The Midnight on the Bayou Escape Room thankfully is as complex as I had hoped and allowed me to explore and wander to the benefit of my team, rather than the detrimental time-wasting it sometimes is.

The Midnight on the Bayou Escape Room is hands down one of the most immersive and challenging escape rooms in the LA/Orange County Area. The massive room is beautifully inhabited by masterfully crafted set pieces, perfectly portrayed back-stabbing reunion host, and puzzles that will wrinkle your brain. The puzzles have a great amount of variety in terms of type and difficulty that in itself makes for a really exhilarating mental workout. One of my favorite moments was the completion of most of essentially all of the complex puzzles and the complete block we had on one of the most obvious and simple ones. The variance of the puzzles themselves serves to create their own puzzles. It’s brilliant. Red Lantern Escape Rooms are truly masters of their craft and have created an amazing escape room experience with the Midnight on the Bayou Escape Room. I give the Midnight on the Bayou Escape Room a 5 out of 5, and I can’t wait to see Red Lantern Escape Rooms do next.

Red Lantern Escape Rooms is located at:

471 West Lambert Road,
Suite 108
Brea, CA 92821

You can book your turn at the Midnight on the Bayou Escape Room HERE

For the record, we beat it with 4 people. Boo-yah!