First thing you need to know: Lloyd Gardens in Portland, Oregon is not an escape room. It may feel like one, and there may be some keys to discover and some bookcases and suitcases to poke around in, but you won’t be locked into anything, and puzzles, for the most part, just do not exist in this space. For some, this might come as a bit of a bummer, but for many who crave a story-based experience that treads just a little off the beaten path, this experience might very well be for you.

The premise is fairly simple: the Institute for Experimental Folklore (IXF) has uncovered a series of rooms relating to something called the Royal North Barrington Botanical Society, and it’s up to you, the IXF’s guests, to piece together that story. How and when you progress through the experience is entirely up to you, the participant. You can skip between rooms, pore over notes, and move things around as you please. Your only objective is to try to piece together a narrative as best you can by going through the bits of ephemera and artifacts you’ll discover along the way. It really is that simple and clean.

For the most part, that simplicity works for the Lloyd Gardens experience, as going through the rooms without the pressure of a ticking clock or harried teammates changes the experience from something that feels like really intense homework (i.e., an escape room) into something that can more effectively convey a story. You are very much poking through someone else’s personal effects in hopes of finding clues or important objects, and in doing so, you’re slowly unfolding the story (or at least what you think might be the story), all while feeling perhaps a bit like a voyeur or trespasser.

But in a few ways, the premise’s simplicity works against the experience. One of the major issues we ran into was that after we had pulled together what we thought were all the significant clues, there was nothing to signify the end of the experience. No sign, no audio signal, no “big reveal” per se. Again, it was completely up to us how we wanted to go through this experience, and as sometimes-puzzlers who like poring over details, that freedom meant we were digging everywhere for that conclusion, that ending.

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Sam Cole, the co-creator of Lloyd Gardens, happened to be running the experience the day we attended, and explained that there was a version of the story that he had written up as a seed for world building, but it’s really always up to the guests to make up their own story. There was no “canon,” save for the canon we make ourselves in the process.

For puzzlers and escape room artists, that may be a bit of a negative, as chasing the serotonin rush that comes with a defined, quantifiable, achievable ending is often half the reason of going at all. Unfortunately here, the ending proved to be a little hard to make out, in both story and in time — for example, much to our surprise, we didn’t realize we had been in the gardens for over an hour and a half, well past our allotted hour of snooping time. Cole actually came in afterwards to give us a time check, and let us know we were the last appointment of the day, so the extra time wasn’t a big deal.

This stands as both a testament to how richly detailed the story was, while also showing how the lack of a finale or concluding act can leave anybody chasing their tail for a little longer than necessary.

I hesitate to say that this lack of a conclusion ruined the experience or anything like that, as it was still an enjoyable one. The sets were very well detailed, the designers definitely put their environmental storytelling skills on display, and frankly, the novelty of going to an experience such as this located inside of an actual mall added a not insignificant amount of quirkiness to the proceedings.

All said, the experience was a good one, and it took a party of three to piece together many — if not all — of the significant clues in about an hour and a half. (Again, time slots are limited to an hour, but Cole made it sound like if there were no appointments following yours, then a little spillover isn’t a bad thing.)

Placing your story entirely within the hands of the guests and not guiding them through every little thing shows a lot of trust and hope that they will be smart enough to figure it out on their own. Too often, immersive experiences fall short of this key goal in particular, spoon feeding narrative to participants, all in chronological order, failing to trust in their intelligence. Not so in this case.

As a concept, granting the participant so much agency and freedom is interesting, and it’s a practice we’ve certainly seen carried out elsewhere; Meow Wolf, for starters. But, in the case of Lloyd Gardens, that open ended-ness might have proven to be just a little too much freedom.

Lloyd Gardens runs through the end of June, Wednesdays through Sundays. Tickets are $20 per person, with a maximum of eight people per one hour time slot.

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