I came across this term and Googled it:
But that isn’t everything I need to know. Dopers, help me out. Obviously, I’m completely stuck in fuddy-duddy land. Have you escaped to one of these?
They are rooms full of puzzles - virtually every puzzle either leads to another one or helps provide the solution to another one. The final puzzle unlocks the door to “escape”. You and your group race against the clock to get out.
Generally, you’re not actually locked in; if there’s an emergency or you need to use the restroom, usually you can leave and come back in. Most won’t allow you to take any phones inside, but will provide hints, for a time penalty.
I’ve been to a couple of them. In essence, they are live-action mystery games: the players are placed in a room (or series of room) that has various decorations and things inside it, and they need to search the room, find clues and puzzles inside of the room, and figure out, from the clues and puzzles, how to get out of the room.
Many of them have a theme to the decor and puzzles (horror, spy, sci-fi, etc). You can do them as a solo person, but they are more fun with a group, assuming that you get along with each other, and can work together on the puzzles.
There are also virtual online escape room puzzles.
They are a fad form of entertainment for people self-assured of their own cleverness, much like pub/bar quiz games. You go in and solve “puzzles” to escape. Not having an interest in games in general, the idea of an escape room has absolutely zero appeal to me.
I was pretty clueless about the fad, first discovering it in a My Little Pony episode nearly 8 years ago. It is old and established enough to have been in a My Little Pony episode nearly 8 years ago.
Idk about all of them, but the one I go to has inobtrusive actors playing roles who would subtly help guide you (in character) if you got stuck.
There’s also a Harley Quinn episode.
Just… wow.
How is this different from any puzzle? Are jigsaw puzzles for people self-assured of their own cleverness?
I went to one with a group of cousins about 7 years ago in Delaware. I absolutely hated it. We did have someone come in and help us after awhile but t was a claustrophobic experience for me.
I’ve used both online escape rooms and in-person escape rooms with my classes. Both having the students construct the room and experiencing another class’s escape room are pretty good ways, IMHO, for reviewing course material while at the same time injecting a little entertainment and respite from the usual scholastic slog.
They’re essentially worksheets gamified.
The one in our town opened almost ten years ago, endured the pandemic, and is still going strong. I can’t say the same for a movie theater a couple blocks away. I don’t think it’s just a fad anymore.
A friend of ours lives upstairs from it and was comped tickets as a goodwill gesture. Four of us went in after a few too many margaritas and failed miserably. I can appreciate the attraction but there are already plenty of opportunities to make myself feel stupid without going out of my way to find them.
The trick of defeating an escape room is to put together the right team that can solve the problem. Some people try to recruit disavowed field agents, wisecracking tech specialists, and wiley thieves, or a cadre of specialists in safecracking, gymnastics, explosives, casino operations, and pickpocketing, but I recommend an agile and canny Asian-American, a pro bono lawyer sticking her nose in where it doesn’t belong, a cub reporter hungry for a juicy story about human trafficking, an elderly tour guide and expert in Chinese mysticism, and me, Jack Burton. Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big ol’ storm right square in the eye and he says, “Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it.”
Stranger
Escape rooms arose out of video games that worked the same way (but were usually played solo). The video game escape rooms were themselves basically a pure puzzle version of adventure games like Myst, with the storyline stripped down to almost nothing.
If you have a smartphone, try The Room (on Android or iOS). It’s like a buck. If you enjoy that sort of puzzling, and like group activities, and have some like-minded friends, you’ll probably like real-life escape rooms.
Taskmaster’s take:
An example was a TV programme in the UK, Thee Crystal Maze - some examples here
Nerd heaven is what they are.
Nerd. Heaven.
I used to love playing Adventure Games on my PC, solving the puzzles to get to the next stage of the story, unlock clues about the characters and plot, or indulge in silly jokes. Loads of fun, but a bit outdated these days, they are a much rarer genre. Then they developed Escape Rooms so that you can play them in real life instead.
I’ve been to several and enjoy them.
I think a lot depends on how willing you are to go along with it; for me I can really feel as if I’m in the brig of a 17th century ship (or whatever is the theme), despite the cheap props.
And while we’re recommending adjacent media, there are several good vr games on the quest 3, such as “the room” and “i expect you to die”.
And the soft-horror film Escape Room was also a pleasant surprise.
In addition to the fun of solving the puzzles (if that’s what you’re into), they usually have some pretty cool mechanisms – doors that automatically open, locks that spring free, as you get the solution to one of the puzzles along the way. Every time a safe automatically unlocks with a “chunk!” or some other sound happens, both my wife and daughter jump, which makes it scarier and funnier at the same time.
Not all - I’ve been at a couple that need two or even three people doing simultaneous things to have a needed effect.
The ones I’ve been in have all been great - a lot of great technical work behind-the-scenes for all the stuff like electronic locks, sensors and magnets, UV writing where you need to unlock the batteries for the blacklight torch, codes and callbacks to earlier puzzles in the room.
One piece of advice I always give to newbs - look behind and under EVERYTHING.
Spoiler for one particular recuring mechanic:
Also, all the ones I’ve done have never been just one room. Inevitably they seem to start in one room but part of solving it is opening more rooms. In one, people needed to be in the starter and the additional room, without direct line-of-sight, doing things and shouting back-and-forth to solve something
IME, escape rooms are really all about teamwork. The ones that we’ve solved quickest weren’t because everyone was the smartest, but because we were methodical and communicated well. Nerdery is optional. Teamwork isn’t.