The Rumor was out, that there is a new type of game for us adults out there, right here in Portland. Where you get some friends together and go lock yourselves in a room with each other and have 1 hour to escape. Oh yeah, this sounds like fun.
For some history go to this link.
We all piled into one car and drove to the building. A small series of shops, we sit in the car talking about how excited we are and wondering if we just walk in or call or what? So we finally decide to just go up to the door. We knock, and a nice woman answers the door and asks us to enter. So we go in and we're told to make ourselves comfortable on a couch and a few chairs. She gives us the rules, the story, and then leads us into the escape room.
POW, we are in the game. Time starts and confusion is gripping our minds. We look around and at one another wondering what to do next. Soon the ice melts and we begin to move about the room escape game. We start finding things and putting things together, it didn’t take long for us to team up and work together to start solving this and that. We even started finding things that were not part of the escape game, pulling numbers out of photos and off book pages and so much data!!!!!!. We were overwhelmed with the possibilities the room presented us. We tried everything everywhere, a few of us had some rational thought left and were able to use some of the things we gathered to work out a puzzle here and there. We slowly got back on track and focused on the task at hand. Time was ticking, the eye of the moderator was watching via a camera in the previous room. We were all focused on one puzzle but made a crucial mistake. We listened to one person's idea and based the whole solution of the puzzle on that idea. Which was wrong, unfortunately, but we were too invested in the idea that we couldn’t change our mindset. Luckily, we accidentally, brute forced a puzzle and it spilled the contents that got us passed our self-made barrier. We were able to use the new information to solve the final puzzle and open the door just in the last few seconds of our hour. Or so we thought.She gave us a few extra seconds so we got the thrill of victory instead of the let down of defeat.
We walked away from that escape game victorious (in our minds at least), but more so, learning a lot more in the process of what we liked, and what could be improved upon for our ideas.
We knew we needed to make our room escape games as immersive as possible. We don’t want to have puzzles just laying around the room for no purpose. We must make the room the puzzle and everything in the puzzle must match the room and purpose of the room. We learned locks can be problematic when people don’t know to hit the “#” at the end of a keypad combination. We learned we were going to really do our own Room Escape Game as this was just too darn much fun.
Our team has changed players over the last couple years, and we are pretty confident we can pull together a great team for any Room Escape Game we encounter.
We look forward to visiting many more Room Escape Games both in Portland and around the world. But first, we need to finish our own rooms and deliver on what we promised ourselves and our fans. Looking forward to opening the “Assassin’s Deadly Game” soon.
