Escape Room Review: Star Trek: Quantum Filament at Escapeology

Recently, the “Attractions Magazine” crew was invited out by Escapology Orlando to try their newest escape room, Star Trek: Quantum Filament. As big fans of Star Trek in all of its incarnations, we were very excited to try out this officially licensed escape room experience.

This Star Trek escape game centers around the USS Discovery from the “Star Trek: Discovery” series and takes place within the timeline of the show. Fans of Star Trek will recognize key elements unique to the franchise, such as the communication badges and set design, while fans of “Star Trek: Discovery” specifically will get even more out of hearing the show’s characters and knowing about key events from the series. No knowledge of Star Trek is required to participate in the experience, but, as with any attraction centered around an Intellectual Property, familiarity with the show will only add to the enjoyment.

In Star Trek: Quantum Filament, guests take the role of engineers from the far future, exploring a relic of humanity’s space-faring past. Of course, something goes wrong and the ship suffers severe damage which locks the crew down and strands your team just outside of the auxiliary control section. This, of course, means that your team are the only ones who can get the ship’s systems operational again before the antimatter containment field drops below 15% and destroys the Discovery, which should occur in, wouldn’t you know it, 60 minutes. (See the intro video below.)

Poking fun at the escape room tropes aside, we thought “repair the space ship” is a really solid theme for an escape room, which is underutilized. The time limit and urgency are organic, and best of all, no traditional locks! Unfortunately, it turns out to be a double-edged sword when a reliance on technology can lead to game (and immersion) breaking situations when the real world computer systems also don’t feel like cooperating, or worse, haven’t been tested enough. 

We played Star Trek: Quantum Filament with a team of four experienced escapers and completed the game with about 20 minutes remaining. The puzzle progression was fairly linear and followed the typical pattern of completing a puzzle to reveal pieces of several other different puzzles. At this point, you have enough pieces to complete another puzzle, revealing more pieces for the remaining puzzles and giving you enough pieces to complete one of those. And repeat.

The décor and theming of the room are taken directly from the iconic Star Trek style architecture everyone knows. We had no issues with the scenery and effects that were present, we just wished more elements could have been included. A rumbling floor, red spinning warning lights, a klaxon, or other little touches would have made the experience more immersive. We also only heard the voices of the Star Trek crew. It would have been nice to have seen them on-screen. Some of the lines of dialog we heard seemed to be directly from the show, and others sounded like they may have been sound-alike voice actors. (You can hear the voice of “Michael Burnham” in the video below.)

Our primary complaint about the room was the technological issues we had, including unresponsive touch screens and a certain game breaking situation we experienced that, to steal a term from video games, soft locked us and made the game unfinishable. Long story short, we found a partially erased code that corresponded to a puzzle which had apparently been removed from the game. When we entered this code, we were prompted to solve a puzzle that didn’t exist, leading to much confusion until the game master came in, saw the situation and announced we had basically won and let us out of the room. This conclusion to the experience left a bit of a bad taste in our mouths, taking away the joy that comes from putting in that final answer and opening the door and escaping. After mentioning this to the Escapology team, we are hopeful that they will take the time to remove this “extra” code entirely so no one else accidentally breaks the game.

In the end, we still enjoyed ourselves, but really felt this could have gone from an OK experience to a great one with the technological issues ironed out. Since this room recently opened in Orlando, we are hopeful that, with some more time, they can work those kinks out. We rate this a medium-difficulty room that is very linear, with a primary focus on pattern recognition puzzles. This is a perfect room for fans of “Star Trek” looking to escape into (or out of) the universe created from the franchise.