My main knowledge of escape rooms is that Bob’s Burgers episode where two angry couples are trapped together in a crappy puzzle room, though my perception of them was slanted before that, too; I always imagined them as slightly hokey gimmicks perfectly calibrated to get you to fight with your friends. But I did my first one yesterday, and I actually enjoyed it a lot.
On Sunday, four friends and I went to Mysstic Rooms’ “Montauk Project,” one of several experiences housed in an unassuming building in Brooklyn. The room itself had a loose plot about uncovering a mystery on an old Air Force base; my first surprise came from the fact that it wasn’t just a single locked room. I don’t want to spoil it (the escape room people were very uptight about spoilers, which is fair!), but it involved following a variety of clues and solving puzzles to power items, open padlocks, unlock doors, and uncover secret compartments.
I’m familiar with solving game puzzles from video games, but it felt really different to solve them in the real world. The physicality of it all heightened the way that game puzzles don’t always make narrative sense (why would moving X object cause Y to happen), but this suspension of disbelief seems necessary to make interesting puzzles to solve. Some of the puzzles got their complexity from requiring solving other puzzles to get their necessary parts, while others were standalone. Some were fairly obvious, while others required steps that wouldn’t have occurred to me and made me glad I was with a group. It was fun to rush around a room opening things and flipping over objects, and rewarding to have a physical response to solving a puzzle correctly.
The staff member running our room watched our entire hour-long session on a camera and intercom and was available to give us hints if we asked (both they and the website said it was totally OK to ask for hints, which I probably wouldn’t have done on my own). They also weighed in on occasion when they overheard us not being sure if we’d done something right, and in one moment when something accidentally triggered too early. At one point, I wondered aloud to my friends if it drove the staff crazy watching people try to solve the rooms when they knew the solution; the staffer butted in with a deadpan “yes.”
I was impressed with the way the room was designed to minimize getting stuck on the wrong path. The staffer told us in advance that puzzles were single use, and that the room didn’t require backtracking, which was helpful advice. There was minimal unnecessary decoration, and many things that weren’t clues were bolted down or clearly inoperable. (The staffer told us that people have often broken things in the rooms.) I assumed that a lot of the puzzles were manually operated by the staffer, but they told us afterwards that most of the room ran on sensors and magnets.
I’m pleased that my friends and I worked together well and didn’t devolve into bickering, especially as time started to run out. After we’d beat the room, our staffer told us they’d seen plenty of people fight, either because of the room or because they seemed to be in a fight when they got there. They also said they’d seen lots of first dates to escape rooms, which seems like a terrible idea for a first date to me, but also an admirably bold choice.
I was really curious about how the room’s design and staff interaction work with the time limit. Unlike a video game, where you have all the time in the world to poke around and go down dead ends once you buy the game, it seems tough to me to design a physical experience with a firm end, where you’d have to pay and start all over if you couldn’t beat it. I wondered how designers balance making a room hard enough that players would find it fair if they couldn’t solve it, while also making it solvable by a wide range of people without making it too easy. Our staffer told me that there are lots of things they can do behind the scenes to move players along, and that they can decide how much to help depending on how a group is approaching the room and how they seem to feel about solving it. It got me really curious about how escape rooms are designed and playtested, where you have to weigh so many constraints against the limitless ways a group of people might think. (If you are one of our Aftermath readers who works on these kinds of experiences, please weigh in!)
Overall, I was surprised to enjoy it as much as I did. I’ve played boardgames or D&D with these same friends, but I don’t do a lot of game-playing in the real world or with other people, so it was a nice change of pace. It also got me curious to check out other escape rooms, not something I ever thought I would say. It definitely doesn’t seem like a good first date activity, though.
