I'm part of a group of six puzzle-loving people, and Rise of the Mad Pharaoh was I believe our seventh room escape together. (Starting to lose count.) This one was a lot of fun! We beat the room with less than two minutes to spare, and the tension was definitely palpable. The plot was of course quite campy and silly, with lots of fun jokes scattered about. Our host did an amazing job setting the scene, and his hints were excellent - never too obvious, yet exactly what we needed to figure out a particularly tough part of the puzzle.

Like some other reviewers, I also appreciated the fact that the puzzles weren't all just different forms of combination locks. There was a good variety of puzzles to solve, and the fact that each of us had a role with helpful flavor text really helped as well.

Finally, the theme itself was a lot of fun. My wife is a big fan of ancient Egypt, so doing an Egyptian-themed room escape was even more fun for that. But at the same time, the room was complete enough that you don't have to know anything at all about Egypt to be able to solve the puzzles. So don't be scared off by the theme - it IS a challenging room, but just keep your wits about you and pay attention to details, and you can solve it all!

We've done a number of escape rooms around Seattle, and even in a few other states, and Hourglass Escapes does raise the bar. Good use of technology, physical items, thematic plots, etc. There were a couple technical difficulties during our experience but it certainly doesn't seem like this is the norm. Would recommend to a friend.

I've been to many other escape rooms. This one was unique in that a lot of the puzzles center around one artifact. It is not as hard as others I've done but is still challenging. We solved it with a group of 8 people.