The time on the wall read 1 min and 45 seconds. Our hearts were pounding, adrenaline was pumping while holding a box that held the key to our escape. With the final clues in hand, all we had to do was put the pieces together. We started to decode the final message to unlock the last combination lock when…
RRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!
And time was up. We were trapped forever! Just kidding, but just 3 more minutes and victory would have been ours!
Let me take a couple of steps back now as I’m sure you’re asking, what the heck just happened and where did the 1 min and 45 seconds come from?
Escape The Room
For my birthday this year, my sister got me a gift to go to Escape The Room. Escape The Room is an immersive, interactive puzzle game where you and your team need to decode puzzles and find clues to help you locate a key that helps you escape to freedom. You have 60 minutes to accomplish this task. These games can be found all over the world and are a great way to team build with your company or have an awesome hour of fun with a group of friends or family.
The Puzzle
No spoilers I promise as I would not want to deprive you of this experience. Our particular puzzle was called “The Dig”. It was very Indiana Jones meets Legends of the Hidden temple with secret doors, hidden numbers and tiki statues that lighted our way to more puzzles to decode. At one point, I was completely like those kids that would get stuck at the Shrine of the Silver Monkey where you could never get the statue right. I used to sit and yell at the kids on the screen on how could they screw this up its so simple. (Legends of the Hidden Temple reference just in case this makes no sense to you). Yea, when under pressure what seems like simple stuff isn’t always so simple.
Fortunately when you get stuck you have a puzzle master keeping an eye on you via cameras (sounds creepy but it’s not, and our guy was really nice). And, if he is ever so kind, he will throw you a clue to get you moving in the right direction again. So no worries if you feel like you may get stuck and then just sit there for 45 minutes and wait until its done because you have absolutely no idea what you are looking at.
The occasional flickering lights made us jump a bit and we were waiting for someone to scare us like a haunted house. However this did not happen so don’t worry. But there are multiple games to choose from depending on your location so you can try out different puzzles and themes.
The Team
I went with my sister and pseudo-sister and the three of us headed into “The Dig”. The guy informed us it’s usually teams of 6 or more that tend to take part and have better luck solving it, but with a few heads short we were determined to come out victorious.
But as the clock ran down to that last 1 min and 45 seconds, we fell inches short of said victory. But we were victorious in the fact that teams of our size don’t tend to make it as far as we did. Holding our escape in our hands. So we were able to take a small win in that. Then had our victorious loser photo as our parting gift.
Would you do this again?
Absolutely. This is probably one of the coolest birthday experience gifts I’ve ever received. It was fun, amusing, and thrilling to go through this discovery experience with two people I love dearly. I can’t wait to do it again, and next time … I WILL ESCAPE!
I did Escape The Room in Philadelphia, PA. If you are not near or visiting Philadelphia, just google Escape Room and where you are, you should be able to find one. I found this directory, but I’m not sure how often it is updated.
Have you done an Escape The Room experience? Comment below, I would love to hear about it or what you thought!
Haha – great description of the chaos that can come from one of these experiences. Did a session at Escape the Room Philly in their first weeks and had a great time. There’s nothing like that moment of sheer panic when there’s about 2 minutes left on the clock, you’re 99.999% sure you’ve solved the puzzle, you put the key in the door (ours was a locked office), and the door doesn’t open. Our Puzzle Master was nice enough to flash up a message telling us to try again and then…finally…click! We were out.
Glad they’re expanding to new scenarios! Definitely something I wanted to see grow. Thanks for bringing back a great memory!
Sounds awesome! The one in Philly says they are opening a new one called “The Vault” at the end of January. I’m excited about that one. Sounds awesome.
We did this with 5 people ranging in age from 18-70 yrs old and all of us had a blast! Great way to spend an hour with teens and grandparents. We didn’t escape but had lots of laughs trying. -mightyessays.com