Unprompted thoughts on the nature of escape games from a former designer of said games; read at the risk of your own boredom:
When I was a design engineer at 5 Wits our philosophy was similar to what you mention above, Alicia. We designed our adventures to be sequential storytelling, where once you progressed from a room, it was sealed so you couldn't go backward, allowing us to theoretically start a new group when the first was about halfway through.
We also built and designed all our games to be auto reset, meaning either they had an "A" solution and a "B" solution, so guests actually would perform the reset for the next group simply by solving the puzzle (let's say moving pieces from the incorrect "A" state to the now correct "B" state), or there was an auto-reset built right into the room (there was a puzzle involving gears on pegs, and the pegs would shoot out of the wall at the beginning of the game, then retract during the dragon attack, causing the gears to crash back into a trough below, resetting the game and also acting as a show element). This meant unless something broke on us, no human reset was needed in any room, so we could keep cycling groups with minimal downtime.
Our adventures were about 30 minutes (not counting the little pre-show), the aim being that you spent about 10 minutes in three rooms which seemed to be our magic number, but it could have also been expanded to more rooms. The added benefit of the 5 Wits model was that all paying guests saw all elements of the show, no matter how successfully or poorly they performed. No matter if they had no idea what was going on and never touched or interacted with a single thing, or if they breezed through every challenge, each person saw each room and each "big" effect, which meant from an expenditure standpoint we also never spent money on an element ~60% of guests would never see, and a guest felt like they got the full experience even if they failed. I cannot tell you the number of times people confidently came striding out proclaiming victory when they just had clearly explained to them by an Evil AI system that they had doomed all of humanity and were being air-locked into space. The central nerve system of the game kept track of the success of the group and then would give them a good, bad, or mid ending depending on their ending score, so there was also incentive to come back too.
I could see a similar approach working well here vs. a traditional escape game for them, as with just 3 adventures we were able to have at least 9 groups in the space at once (one toward room 3, one in the pre-show, one queueing), tripling a traditional escape game's throughput. This also meant time between games was also never more then 15 minutes, so if a group did not want to wait inside the store they were free to wander the mall or wherever we were located, and there is certainly more than 15 minutes worth of time waste in Citywalk.
Ok, end ramblings.