Mike Schnurr
- Jul 17, 2021
- 4 min read

Breakout Waikiki - "Patient 57"

Updated: Apr 10

LOCATION:  Waikiki, Hawaii, USA

Photo above is property of Breakout Waikiki

📝 ETR DECODER

🔑 GAME: Patient 57
📅 DATE PLAYED: July 17, 2021
🎬 GENRE: Asylum
🧠 DIFFICULTY (Based on 3 PPL): 7.5/10
👥 TOTAL # OF PLAYERS: 2-8 ppl
🕒 LENGTH OF TIME: 60 Mins
💰 PRICE: $32/PP (Min 4 Players)
☎️ BOOKING TYPE: Private
🔓 ESCAPED/ COMPLETED?: Yes

📖 THE STORY

Stuck, trapped, imprisoned; your group has been subject to mental experiments for what seems like years now. All of a sudden, during an emergency, you see your chance and squirrel away to the doctors office hoping to escape. It is here that you will be solving puzzles and cracking the codes to find the door key to unlock freedom from the illegal experiments performed upon you and your fellow patients.

Video above is property of ESCAPETHEROOMers

🎯 HIT THE BULLSEYE

This room will have your team scrambling and solving puzzles in many nooks and corners of the space provided. Initial thoughts when walking into the first room led us to believe that we were in a large doctors office. Posters of the skeleton, desks and cabinets with locks to keep prying eyes away from everything a morally questionable doctor would have while testing and experimenting all led to the immersion of being in a Russian “hospital”.
It was a mad rush to complete everything in this room..and the next room...and the next room. The game kept surprising our team with new areas that were well hidden until we unlocked the proper codes.
It kept to its theme and provided a setting that was believable, a place where we could have been trapped ourselves. To keep with the immersion, every fifteen minutes or so (to let us know how much time is left) our radio communicator would announce an update on the emergency evacuation process and how close the doctor is to coming back. This small little detail in the room gives us a greater sense of urgency and increases the need to get out of this metaphorical jail cell.
There is a lot to do in the hour while the group is in the doctor's office and with its nonlinear puzzles it would be best to start to divide and conquer. There are puzzles that require teamwork, others that use some intellectual thinking, and some even have you playing games with the very technology that has been tested on you for so long. Most of the puzzles flow in a way so that each step per individual puzzle makes sense and with a little bit of thinking and creativity to solve each. Having a good mix between physical puzzles and logical puzzles was a welcome addition to the game. It will give players of all backgrounds an opportunity to excel in the type they solve the best. This whole space is connected and do not think that a piece of information is not needed, if it looks important, it will most likely be.

🧩 MISSED THE MARK

The biggest criticism of the game is the storyline’s interconnectivity with the puzzles that one has to complete. The puzzles that are put into the game are in the world the creators made but we didn’t find out too much more about the reason why “our group” was chosen to be experimented on through their solutions, solving them gave us the keys to the next riddle in the list. (Update from the creators 8/16/21: Patient 57 is the sequel to Room 13. If you did not play that game, it would make sense why some of the context was missing of why you were doing the puzzles in the first place! We wanted the game to work stand-alone, but we also wanted platers of the first game to feel like it was Part 2).

🏹 TAKE A SHOT?

The venue is located along the main strip of Waikiki Beach and there are plenty of shops and places to explore. Parking can be a little chaotic but Breakout offers validated parking for 4 hours at the Embassy Suites garage. Accessibility in Patient 57 is not available to all. There are a couple locations where a step up is needed and crawling must be available. Completing this game with three players, we got out with only seconds remaining. There is a lot packed into this game and it was one of the harder (but fair) games I have completed in sometime. If you are in Honolulu and looking for an escape game, you will not be disappointed with the experience given by Breakout Waikiki!