No brain, no gain

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/11/2015 (3596 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

People have used their wits to escape from many places — Alcatraz, New York City or even reality — so it was only a matter of time until the process became a business.

There are now five companies in Winnipeg specializing in “escape rooms,” the latest thing in off-the-beaten-path entertainment.

Two of them, Epic Escape and the Real Escape, are about to celebrate their one-year anniversaries. A trio of others, Codebreakers Escape Rooms, Ultimate Lockdown and Enigma Escapes, followed in their footsteps.

Even though they all operate with a similar premise, a friendly competition among the quintet has begun, as customers who enjoy their experience at one venue decide to try out another.

My son, Alex, and I walked into Epic Escape not really knowing what to expect. We had looked up a few things online and figured the experience could be something like the TV show Survivor, where you had to figure out some puzzles, complete a challenge and potentially outwit your opponents.

For some reason, I thought it might also be a little like The Walking Dead, in that if we didn’t escape in time, a bunch of walkers would break through the door and eat our brains.

Luckily, photographer David Lipnowski joined us as we were ushered into the New York room, a sparse 100-square-foot space with a small bookcase, a chair, a coffee table, some paintings on the wall and three locked containers.

Before we were locked in, one of Epic’s owners, Wade Gamey, told us we had the option of asking for a couple of hints over the course of the hour that we’d have to extricate ourselves. He smiled, closed the door and retreated to the viewing room, where the camera in the corner would show him our every move.

Without giving away too much of the challenge, we immediately scoured the room for clues and found it full of little pieces of paper with letters and numbers on them. Then we tried to figure out what all of the pictures and magazines with photos of the Statue of Liberty and other New York landmarks meant.

Or didn’t mean. Gamey told us while no idea was too crazy when it came to trying to solve the room’s puzzles and riddles, some clues were red herrings designed to throw us off and cost us time.

After half an hour, we had made virtually no progress. What’s worse, we felt as if we had only been in the room for about 10 minutes. Then, slowly, things started to click. We figured out the combination for one box, but our sense of elation was immediately tempered by the sight of more clues.

“What the hell is a battery for?” I wondered.

In fact, I mused, that’s the last thing I’d need if I wanted to escape. First on my list? An axe.

We kept plugging away and eventually opened up the remaining boxes. All that remained was to use the final clues to figure out the combination for the safe that held our key to freedom.

As the seconds ticked down, we wildly threw out ideas and held up various clues to a painting of the New York skyline in a frantic attempt to solve our final puzzle.

The fact that beeps accompany the final 30 seconds or so means that unless you’re about to open the safe, you resign yourself to the fact that you didn’t escape in time.

As the buzzer went, Gamey opened the door — no zombies in sight, thankfully — and told us we were 95 per cent of the way there. He said only one three-person team had escaped in the last year, so at least we had that going for us.

Overall, there’s a 20 to 25 per cent success rate; the more people in your group, the better your chances of escaping.

Epic has been offering a pair of the New York rooms for the past year — this allows different teams to compete against each other — and on Wednesday, it will open up a pair of rooms dubbed Flight 7247.

To create as authentic a feel as possible, the owners found a couple of sections of an old 737 in Kansas and had them shipped to Winnipeg. It’s a little eerie sitting in half an airplane.

I presume that being unable to solve the puzzles in the room will mean the jetliner could smash into the side of a mountain, incinerating everyone in a ball of fire. Epic isn’t saying much until the room is ready for takeoff

“We’re not going to give away too much of the story, but there are some crazy things that go on,” Gamey said.

Almost none of which, he assured me, involve zombie pilots.

Speaking of urgency, that’s what Megan Schmidt, owner of the Real Escape, has created with her four rooms on west Portage Avenue. There’s Escape from Death Row, Insane Asylum, Bank Heist and next week a haunted house called the Mavis House will be unveiled.

Even if you are unable to untangle the web of puzzles and challenges in the hour allotted to your group, you will not be strapped into an electric chair, committed to a sanitorium, thrown in jail or decapitated by somebody wearing one of those masks from Scream.

“The themes create an ambience and a sense of urgency of trying to get out as quickly as possible. Nothing is jumping out and scaring you… well, unless you’re in the Mavis House,” she said.

Escape rooms cater to groups ranging from 12-year-olds celebrating birthdays to corporate clients looking to work on team-building.

One of the best parts of the experience, she says, is people are forced to use their wits to figure things out instead of looking up answers on Google.

“We make people put their cellphones away. Even if you had it, it wouldn’t help you,” she said.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca