Inside the Locked Room You Have to Solve Puzzles to Escape

What's This?

One of the many rooms at Escape the Room in New York City. Visitors are locked inside, then told to solve the clues -- here, the symbols on the walls -- to find a way out.

Image: Mashable

By Eric Larson2014-04-26 08:07:00 -0400

Carl and Kassie seem like a nice enough couple. The two of them, both tall, dark-haired and handsome, lounge on a couch in a recently renovated office space on the 11th floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan. They stand up to shake our hands as we walk inside.

Carl crosses his arms and rocks back on the heels of his feet. "So, you think you're ready for this?"

For the next hour, we're going to be locked inside a room with him and Kassie. It's a small, maybe 30-by-40-foot space, with two windows, a cabinet and a table with the remnants of a poker game scattered across its top.

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It's our job to sort through the room for clues and find a suitcase, which allegedly holds the key to our freedom. If we don't make it out before 60 minutes, we lose.

The door behind us closes with the daunting click of a lock.

Carl's eyes widen. "All right, then. Let's get to work."

Inside the office-themed room at Escape the Room in New York City. What's in the briefcase? (We actually don't know.)

It's called Escape the Room. The game is popping up in cities across the world. The New York version opened November 2013.

For $28, visitors can choose an office, a home or an agency (that's the one we're in) for their room setting. Each one comes with the same rules: You have one hour, and not a second longer, to find a way out.

"There are a million things to do in New York," says Jack De Stefano, 26, who cofounded the company. "People usually go out to drink or eat. This is something unique; it gives people the chance to use their brains in a different way."

The idea for the game, he says, is credited to video games like Zork and Adventure , which rose to popularity in Japan in the late '70s and early '80s. Both placed gamers in trapped scenarios, and used text prompts to give them clues on how to escape.

"Every story begins with a queen." Except for this one. This one begins with Carl and Kassie.

The concept evolved over time, and now, there are more advanced games and apps just like it. Popular role-playing games, such as The Legend of Zelda or the Final Fantasy series, incorporate similar escape room elements throughout their story lines.

The first real-life escape room game opened in Japan in 2007. Five years later, the same company opened another in San Francisco. Others have launched in Seattle, Chicago and St. Louis.

De Stefano says the office in New York gets around a thousand visitors each week. Most people struggle (the success rate is only about 15%), but the rooms weren't designed to be easy.

"We didn't want to design something that people could blow through in 15 or 20 minutes," he says. "It's tough, and you really need to work together and think. But it's an enjoyable challenge."

As the minutes wind down for our group, we struggle to conquer the final challenge. The briefcase we need is in plain sight, but it's protected by a "force field" security system that can only be unlocked through a series of switches. The guidelines for correctly operating them lie in previous clues and seemingly insignificant objects we've breezed past over the previous 60 minutes. Hurriedly, and luckily, we flip the right switches and unlock the field to obtain our key out of the room.

A deck of cards on a table inside Escape the Room in New York City.

De Stefano is waiting outside the door with a cheeky grin. "Six seconds left," he says. "That was close."

It's a sloppy finish, but we'll take it. We all high-five each other and pose for a picture, which De Stefano says he'll post to the company's Facebook page.

It feels nice, and certainly less claustrophobic, to be out of the room. What's weird is that, with our adrenaline still running high from the past hour of puzzle-cracking, we kind of want to be locked in again.

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Topics: culture, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, new york city, Travel & Leisure, U.S., Work & Play