Andrew Woods
- Oct 27, 2023
- 7 min read

Omventure Markham - "Motel Betty"

Updated: Apr 22

LOCATION:  Markham, Ontario, Canada

Photo above is property of Omventure Markham

Photo above is property of ESCAPETHEROOMers

📝 ETR DECODER

🔑 GAME: Motel Betty
📅 DATE PLAYED: August 6, 2023
🎬 GENRE: Horror
🧠 DIFFICULTY (Based on 3 ppl): 8/10
👥 TOTAL # OF PLAYERS: 4-9 ppl
🕒 LENGTH OF TIME: 120 Mins.
💰 PRICE: CAD $60/ pp
☎️ BOOKING TYPE: Private
🔓 ESCAPED/ COMPLETED?: No

📖 THE STORY

It is one dark and stormy night for the ages. You and your friends are lost, driving in the impenetrable night of the countryside's winding roads. With equal parts avidity and anxiety you witness the torrential rain as it batters against the car windows, terrorizing your nerves, while the knell of a great thunderous crash resounding all around you signals a shocking flash of lightning that exposes the surrounding trees in their helpless state of petrification and abuse. The car has slowed to a safe but untenable pace of motion. Everyone is tired and on edge, the novelty of the situation having now descended into a mad desperation, as you search for a safe harbor.

When in the distance a faint glow appears beckoning you towards it, entrancing your hopes like a mirage. As the phantasmal glow takes shape into a sign you read the neon letters as they hang over the quaint lot illuminated beneath it - "Motel Betty"!

The driver subconsciously slows the car, drawn by the promise of relief. You all look at each other and exchange eager glances of agreement that the appearance of this humble motel is surely an auspicious sign, and that you must stop here for the night. You pull into and park in the ominously empty lot, before making a break for it and quickly dashing through the rain into the lighted entry space of the lobby. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief as they dry themselves off, happily absorbing the dry warmth. The TV glows, the clock is ticking, the light is buzzing, but there's no one there. You hesitate in the stark and abject light before ringing the bell. The shrill call echo's in eerie emptiness. Nothing. Hello?

Suddenly, a strange inversion of consciousness comes over you, a sudden fear, an awareness of predation, as you go completely still and your senses rove, and you feel yourself no longer subject but a player in some strange scene.

“Motel Betty, well where is Betty anyways? Betty! Betty!

You all shout in a moment of communal laughter, shaking off the ill feeling, ahahahahaha...until the protective glow of that happy ambrosia dies away, and you shrink as you feel your rye smiles retract grotesquely in the mirthless opacity of the silence, and you are left alone and bereft with that unsettling feeling once again... It's then you notice that there's a key card on the counter of the concierge desk. Room 011. We'll settle up in the morning, I'm sure it will be fine. Taking the card you all step into the dimly lit hallway, scanning its silent corridors, and following the numbers on the doors in your head as you peer further down its vertiginous chasm. It must be at the end.

You all take one last hesitating glance at each other, recognizing the fear in each other's faces that none of you will consciously allow themselves to admit. In spite of your misgivings you all take that first huddle step together and begin walking down the long hallway towards the room that Betty has prepared for you.

🎯 HIT THE BULLSEYE

This was an epic room, the kind you long for as an escape room junky. It's that exciting journey into the heart of a great adventure that you are only too happy to immerse and lose yourself in. It's what escape rooms are meant to be. Peak entertainment, living the fantasy.
From the narrative and its slowly uncovered horror, to the atmosphere and its constant sense of suspense and terror, to the set which was an inspired collage of horror movie favorites, the design of the room was totally on point. The moment you step into that first claustrophobic hallway and wonder what the hell awaits you behind those doors, to when you unlock the first door peeking in slowly only to say hell nah, to staring down the long and dark foreboding and unavoidable hallways thinking honey, you go first. It was a real journey to the end of the night.
The live actor - and a bow to his/her performance - is used to great effect. They created scenarios that employed the actor in ingenious ways that really set our butts up.
The scare factor: they had us tiptoeing through dark alleys, scared to turn around every corner and open any door. It was to the point where I think I literally started to crouch walk through the scarier areas, denoting my reversion to a childlike state. There was one instance where the whole party collectively grabbed each other for safety, screaming as we dropped to the floor.
Mostly the puzzles were on point. They were classic and clever, if not often conventional, which is not a bad thing in itself. They did a great job of infusing the more obvious elements of the theme and scenario into the puzzles, making you face your fears, isolating you, and employing the props and lore of the horror genre in creative ways. That being said, when compared with the ideal of mimetic design, they sometimes - sometimes! - suffer from often being those abstract, classic escape room type puzzles, which can feel a bit hair brained and arduous in an unfun way, and which I keep harping on in all these articles. It burns me because though the puzzles are still fun and challenging, so much of the scenario is experienced through puzzles which are often not realistically connected with the nature of the scenario itself. What they often are are just a really well done collage of the best of familiar escape room puzzle tropes, shaped in ingenious ways to work with the horror theme.
The tech is quite state of the art, at a level you come to expect of a modern room, and they pushed it to its full potential to create a seamless and immersive experience. The rooms were staged in a full suite of lighting and sound media, something like out of a Vegas magic show. It was a impactive and thematic production, with a big wow factor.
I loved the finale. These weird but enchanting scenes of performance and improvisation where the party finally becomes not just players but actors in the great drama of the room. It's the stuff that escape rooms magic is made of. Once again it employs the live actor in a terrifically ingenious and scary way. The end also uses a charming scenario, which I'd seen used before in other rooms, but that I think is a good way of bringing the group all together in a final test of bonding and mutual support that encapsulates the theme of the group collectively leaning on each other to persevere through the horror.

🧩 MISSED THE MARK

(I'm going to be harsh only because I liked the game and its immense promise so much.)

To begin with, the preamble suffers from giving away too much. They shouldn't tell you a damn thing about the story other than what you would naturally know if you were the character you are playing. That is that you took shelter from the storm at this motel, and that you can't find anybody but decide to stay the night using this key card that you mysteriously found on the reception counter. The rest of the story should be uncovered naturally and through your own deductive powers.
The narrative, though well told, plausible, complete, in its own way, I feel for a horror scenario to preserve its spell, and that pathological sense of fear it induces, it must maintain a certain seriousness, but the second half, I felt, breaks that immersion when the narrative and aesthetic takes a turn to the fantastic. I would have taken it down a much darker path that is true to the seriousness and dread of its original creepiness.. I wanted IT, Japanese horror, and The Exorcist, as opposed to what I feel was a kind of Disney-fied narrative turn. That being said the second act works really well in a way with the overall narrative, the puzzles, and the props, I just think they could have just fashioned something a lot more adult-horror out of it.
The puzzles, oh the puzzles. Well done mimetic rooms set a high bar, and these puzzles are mostly clever, connected with great sets, on theme, as I mentioned, and yet they suffer from being at times merely your classic run of the mill escape room puzzles. And this sense at times of the puzzles being abstract, meaning their logic is disconnected and unrelated to what might realistically be asked of the scenario you are supposed to imagine your in can make them feel tedious and routine. Luckily, I will reiterate that overall it's quite a fun and challenging experience.
In terms of the horror factor, as much as they already did use the live actor to great effect, and used isolation and separation to further scare us, and had great lighting and sound cues, and generally kept us on edge, I believe they could have gone even farther, and just taken every opportunity to relentlessly scare the living crap out of us. I think there were some missed opportunities, as well as some moments when they could have employed more non-actor scare props. This might sound like an inane and insane criticism but yes half the fun is built up in that trepidation that a scare lies literally around every corner and behind every object.
The walky talky hint system can be janky at times, because either you can't hear it properly or the game masters - who were very good by the way - are sometimes a little distracted. There was a degree of confusion and miscommunication which cost us precious time.

🏹 TAKE A SHOT?

Hell yes you should. It is arguably the best room in Toronto. An epic two hour horror adventure filled with memorable escape room moments, what more can you ask for. The more rooms I do the more I want longform escape rooms, odysseys, marathons, something that you can really lose yourself in. Multiple hours, clever mimetically (mimetic!) designed puzzles, super-epic narratives, high tech - bigger better faster. I feel like this room is the product of an escape room arms race, in this case a challenge to take the classic horror themed room to the next level. This is the direction the industry should be heading in, a community competing to outdo each other for the sake of the art, all the while mutually inspiring one another to create something better and better. And meanwhile we get to experience it all. I love it.