The experience was mixed. Escape the Room Denver had some pretty strong pluses and minuses on the continuum of escape room experiences. Overall, the group seemed to have had fun (mostly), but I would speculate that with so many escape rooms available all over Denver, it's not very likely we'll return to this one.
On the plus side, this was the most elaborate environment I've ever seen in an escape room. I've done a few rooms before that felt really polished -- as much as I would have said a room could get. This place blew the top of the bell curve. There was impeccable set decoration, outstanding and clever interactive elements, and fantastic props. If you're a fan of haunted houses (and 'tis the season!), think of the best haunted house you've ever been in. This was the escape room equivalent of that. Top notch.
The actual puzzles you encountered inside the room, however, weren't nearly as polished as the world they'd created. Key parts of the mystery were arbitrarily obtuse; afterward, we talked about how we'd felt like there were several elements we never really "solved" so much as "brute forced" until we tripped upon a solution. I think you could make the case that a couple of these moments were on us. (The room was more observation-based than most, and our group was "failing our perception rolls" quite a bit that day.) Still, there were elements where there was, for example, no clear connection between X and Y -- they just went together.
We also got the strong sense that elements of the room were either malfunctioning, or weren't actually automated (and our monitor fell asleep at the wheel when they were supposed to trigger something for us). Without divulging specifics, I can say that the challenge did contain several escape room staples: electromagnets you have to release, keypads where you have to enter a code, and so forth. More than once during our experience, we would try a solution, have nothing happen, then retry the exact same thing later and have it work. (And if we'd changed something in the interrim that turned a non-working answer into a working one? Well... back to "there was no clear connection between elements.")
Particularly frustrating for us was that the room actually wasn't set up correctly when we began. One puzzle we encountered near the end had actually already been solved when we reached it. We wasted a great deal of time trying to "solve" the puzzle, all the while saying to each other, "but it seems like this IS the answer, right? What are we supposed to DO here?" Further annoyance came when we broke down and asked for hints about it, and had our monitor first give two or three hints about solving the puzzle that was already solved -- not telling us (or not realizing) the mistake that had been made in preparing the room.
In the end, we were successful in escaping with less than two minutes to spare. And while we did have fun, there was also the sense that we'd relied on help more than we'd have liked, and didn't quite understand how we'd made it all the way through. We machine-gunned the monitor with questions at the end. Triumph mixed with confusion is an odd way to feel at the end of an escape room experience.
Escape the Room Denver does certainly excel in the look and feel of its environments, if Jurassic Escape is representative. But other places (like Denver Escape Room in Northglenn) are nearly as impressive in this respect while having much more clever and satisfying puzzles. If you're an escape room junkie "collecting" different locations, you'll probably want to give Escape the Room Denver a try. If you've never done a room before, I'd recommend somewhere else for your first experience.
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