My First Escape Room Experience

 

Lock me up in a room for an hour with a group frantically searching for clues to escape?  Not my idea of a fun evening, given my tendency to suffer from claustrophobia, I thought.  But a recent escape room experience with family members and friends in my home town of El Paso, Texas, changed my mind about this trending entertainment.

Escape rooms go by several different names, such as puzzle rooms and mystery rooms.  I prefer the emphasis on puzzles and critical thinking.  After all, Clue was my favorite board game growing up, and I am still addicted to Agatha Christie mysteries.  Some have observed that escape rooms are a real world version of video game challenges. Others have compared escape rooms to physical adventure games.  

So, what exactly is an escape room?  It is a decorated room into which you and other participants (usually two to six) are locked until you manage to escape or sixty minutes is up, whichever come first. The room contains numerous hidden clues, puzzles, codes, and gadgets that, if located and interpreted correctly, allow you to open the door to freedom.

The El Paso escape room version is named "Disaster, Room 915."  It is located in a house in an older section of the city.  After being greeted by the host in a small living area and receiving a short orientation, we were ushered into a 70's era kitchen, informed that we needed to find an abducted child, and locked in.

One of the aspects of escape rooms is that they can serve as team-building activities.  I was fascinated by roles that different members took on.  The leader of our group was a young, thirty year old professional, a friend of our son's, who quickly assumed a leadership role.  He told us to search everywhere for clues and to call out anything we found, without stopping to analyze if it was a true clue or not.  Working together, we eventually located a hidden key.  Someone said, "I wonder what this key opens?"  Probably ten to fifteen minutes later, someone else said, "I wonder if this key opens the door?"  Duh!  It was, but we only escaped to a locked hallway with two other rooms to explore.

In the next room, someone spied five letters written on the ceiling, hidden by a thin piece of cloth. My husband Wayne, always ready to solve a problem quickly, got on a chair and climbed up to rip down the cloth.  (We later learned from the host who was watching the activity through a video camera that tearing down the cloth was not what was intended.  If we would only have turned on the light switch in the room, the letters would have become illuminated!  Oops!)

The next small room off the hallway was narrow and dark with a bookshelf stacked with movie videos. We knew they must have held a clue, but once again we failed to find the light switch outside the door and were trying to read with small flashlights. (Our cell phones had been confiscated, of course.)  Several of our group became engrossed in remembering how a combination lock worked.

About this time, a voice came through the intercom, advising us that time was up.  "Just five more minutes?" someone in the group begged.  No, time was up.  We were among the 80% of escape room participants who do not solve the puzzle.

Escape rooms have become a lucrative business around the world.  They started in Japan, moved to Europe and other parts of the world, and then arrived in the United States.  Our Los Angeles based son informs us that escape rooms are especially entertaining in his city because of the abundance of actors and set designers available.  The last one he participated in involved being locked in a jail cell!  Local themes are often incorporated into escape rooms, which are after all part game and part theater.

If you are interested in visiting one of the 2800 escape rooms in the world, you can check with escape room directory.  Trip Advisor reviews escape rooms as a favorite entertainment.

And did I suffer from panic or claustrophobia in the escape room?  Not for a minute!  I was too mentally involved in finding clues and interacting with my group.  Of course, our puzzle was not like another one I heard about. That one had a zombie who approachs you and only disappears when you successfully locate a clue!  Yikes!