The Treasure Trove Of Pirate Cove

CU Adventures in Time and Space, a superb escape room venue in Urbana-Champaign, IL, have somehow come up with the novel concept of fitting an entire escape room game onto a shirt. All the puzzles are solved by examining and searching the packed design of this T-shirt - both front and back. You also need to use several papers, an online browser website for inputting answers, and quite a few other props including a bottle that comes with the shirt itself. The game has a lot of personality. A lot of it comes through in the detail-packed shirt, and also through fun audio clips. There are quite a bit of puzzles here, and the game will run at least an hour for most people. A lot of the game feels like a Where’s Waldo search which was a bit overwhelming due to the loud shirt. But the puzzle payoffs and endgame surprised were worth it! And you get to wear the shirt after!

Just as clever as the first shirt … and arguably more clever because they couldn’t reuse any of the tricks! This one did feel a bit more like an online room that also happened to have a shirt as a prop than the first one did, but they still managed to make the shirt central to the experience and we were genuinely surprised and impressed by the finale. Highly recommended.