As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
The saddening extent of Minos' cruelty briefly begins to expand here, ranging from snatching survivors of previous games into another round of death traps to their awful treatment and taunting of other players.
- Zoey begins the movie recounting the deaths of the players in her escape room group in the first film, one by one. As she tries to no avail to explain everything to her therapist, she just isn't able to forget about them and move on. Not until she completes her desperate quest to expose and defeat Minos once and for all.
- Even as Zoey and Ben made it out of their first round of Minos escape rooms, Ben just can't escape the fear of being locked in another one at any given moment - if a nightmare at an overnight stay at a hotel en route to New York and his detailed panic attack at his job when the door was briefly stuck is any indication. There's also no guarantee that he'll stop having such nightmares even when all of this is over and Minos is dealt with.
- When Zoey watches Ben seemingly fall to his death and get pulled under the quicksand, she's instantly grief-stricken; memories of her time with him rush through her mind as she gives a blank stare forward and barely registers Rachel's pleas for her to snap out of it. She gives a small cry of grief as she gets into the escape tunnel and gives a Long Last Look behind as the room completely sinks. Afterward, she blames herself for his apparent death as she had convinced him to go with her; saying that he was her best friend and now she's lost him. After all the trauma and tragedy she's endured, losing her best friend (and potential boyfriend), the one good thing in her life, almost breaks her as she takes a moment to process her loss.
- One can only imagine how it would feel for past survivors of Minos escape rooms who went through hell and back to get out alive to suddenly have their deep-rooted traumas be All for Nothing; with no guarantee they'll even survive again. Case in point: Aboard the subway train that becomes the first escape room, you can already hear Brianna crying out "no" several times as she begins to break down in tears and Theo has a Big "NO!" moment as he frantically tries to break open the subway doors in vain, begging to be let out.
- The first casualty among these survivors is Theo, who is never called by name at all in the film and has endured severe trauma by Minos, having lost his hearing after surviving Minos escape room that was designed as a submarine and the air pressure having burst with him inside. What's worse, is that he had since raised a family that he loved, with his wife waiting for him to come home for her birthday, not knowing that he never will. He'll never get back to his family again all due to the sheer villainy of Minos.
- In the Hourglass Bay room, Rachel backs up into one of the quicksand pits as they ramp up in intensity. Nate, the priest who nearly got the group killed in the previous room, immediately claims that he knows what his purpose is now and jumps into the pit with a life preserver to save her, despite the rest of the group crying out how hopeless it is. He still manages to push a gasping Rachel to safety against all odds, and there's a Hope Spot that he'll survive as well as he pulls on the rope to the others... and then the rope suddenly snaps, sending him straight into the pit and vanishing underneath. Rachel is especially rattled by this, saying that he just saved her life, screaming there had to be a way to help him. However, the group cries that it's pointless as the room itself was beginning to completely collapse and they had to find a way out. Realizing there was nothing left to do, the group is forced to leave him behind.
- Zoey manages to get into the exit in the Acid Rain room and beckons Rachel and Brianna to follow her. However, just before they can enter, Minos denies them an escape as There Can Only Be One winner. The only thing they can do as another round of acid rain begins to fall is to Face Death with Dignity. It's especially heartbreaking to watch Brianna, who realizes she's about to die, completely crumble and sob, "I don't want to die!" An empathetic Rachel soothingly says, "I know" and the two huddle together as they both accept their deaths and get burned alive. A distraught Zoey is briefly Forced to Watch this from the safety of the taxi before being transported away by Minos. It then becomes crueler when it's revealed the next escape room was the last one...
- And speaking of the last escape room, the first thing Zoey notices when she lands there are children's toys and a diary that finally reveals the connection between all the new escape rooms; they're all based on memories that Sonya Harper, the daughter of the presumed dead Amanda Harper from the first film, had about her best day with her parents. To learn that Minos would kidnap her and force her mother, whom Zoey shockingly discovers to be alive, to make escape rooms centered around it, is something truly sad and unspeakable to ponder about. Amanda feels helpless about what she had to do to protect her child and tells Zoey that her crusade against Minos may be useless and she's better off just joining and making the best out of it.
- In the theatrical cut, when Amanda tells Zoey that Minos will take everything she cares about and use it against her to make her work for him, Zoey bitterly asks what was left and practically snarls, "They took everything else!" The fact that Ben was the one good thing Zoey had in her life at that point (having lost her mother and also having few friends due to severe PTSD and struggling to make emotional connections) only for Minos to take that away as well is heartbreaking.
- In the extended cut, when Claire begs Zoey to trust her, after finding out she designed the escape rooms, a furious Zoey yells, "Why would I trust you? YOU KILLED BEN!" Her voice actually breaks when she says his name, really showcasing her grief at losing someone she deeply cared about. When Claire tells her that Ben is still alive as she orchestrated the room to save him, Zoey initially refuses to believe her. When she has to solve Minos' riddle to get Claire out of her glass box (therefore saving Ben as well since Claire knows how to control the rooms), she keeps slipping in Ben's name at random points as she talks aloud to solve it, clearly worried about him as he's trapped and about to die. Seeing Zoey's grief and desperation to save the one person left in her life that she cares about, whom she's openly called her best friend, can really hurt.
