Welcome to the escape room: inside the live-action puzzle challenge that's sweeping Britain

There are two minutes on the clock and all the alarms are blaring. I’m pressing my face against an ancient computer, squinting at the coded messages on screen. “Red…F to V!” I shout haltingly to my teammates through the chaos. “Purple…J and P!” But I’m so absorbed that I don’t notice that they’ve all stopped what they’re doing. “COVER YOUR EARS!” one of them shouts. Then there is a loud noise, and the lights go out.

Welcome to Oubliette, a gilded cage punters pay ￡30 to be locked inside, their freedom dependent on their ability to solve a series of complex puzzles. Combining elements of video games, haunted houses and immersive theatre, the room in south London is just one of hundreds of similar venues that have sprung up around Britain in the last two years. Not just Britain: escape rooms, as they are known, are opening at a giddying rate everywhere from America to the Philippines. They have been described as the “fastest growing entertainment trend since the cinema” and are quickly becoming a staple of stag and hen parties, corporate team-building exercises and friends’ nights out.

When these rooms are well-designed, they are different worlds

David Spira

At the beginning of 2013 there was just one escape room in Britain; today there are 598. More than half of them have opened in the last year alone, and only 15 per cent of them are in London. The American scene has likewise exploded from three companies in January 2014 to approximately 800 earlier this year. New venues are popping up in Leeds, Belfast, Glasgow, Moscow, New York, Tokyo, and a small village outside Stockport; in pubs, in laser tag venues, and inside people’s garages; there is even one on board the world’s biggest cruise ship, the Harmony of the Seas, which set sail on its maiden voyage last in May. Disney, Ford and Google are in on the act, and already there are global escape room chains, at least three of which are planning branches in London. In April, the world’s first escape room conference was held in Amsterdam. Even Barack Obama has had a go, breaking out of a room in Hawaii on Christmas Eve with just 12 seconds to spare.

A typical escape room experience will start in a back alley of a recently gentrified urban district, and your first task will be to find the entrance. Inside, you are greeted by a game master who explains the story. The size of a team varies, usually between two and six. Then the clock starts and you’re inside, squinting around a Nazi bunker or a bank vault or an Egyptian tomb (the strength of the illusion varies). At first you’re quiet, confused. You fan out, exchanging “hmm”s and “aha!”s You search a bookshelf and find scraps of paper, which together give you a three-digit code, which opens a lock which opens a drawer which houses a battery for an ultraviolet torch which illuminates another code. The panic as the clock runs down is intense; the exhilaration when you find an answer, unmistakable.

In Room 33 near London Bridge (pass rate: 40 per cent), my team inched its way through a grid of green lasers before crawling through an air vent into a new room full of locks and hidden codes. At Time Run in London Fields, Hackney (pass rate: 30 per cent), we pieced together clues about the fate of a space station’s crew from their lockers and audio logs. At Enigma Quests, whose ‘School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’ bears more than a passing similarity to a certain magical boarding school, we researched spells then waved a magic wand to open hidden pathways. One room in Portland, Oregon, has a “zombie” (played by an actor) confined by a chain, which gets a foot longer every five minutes, while another in the Philippines requires its players to wear gags, blindfolds, and noise-cancelling headphones. Less threateningly, a full-scale replica of the Eighties TV show The Crystal Maze opened in London this year after raising nearly ￡1m on Indiegogo, a crowdfunding website.

What makes these rooms tick? Where do they come from? Who plays them, and what is behind their sudden and so-far unarrested ascent?

The art of escape

The origins of escape rooms are somewhat mysterious. One owner told me they started in Silicon Valley; another, Hong Kong. But Ken Ferguson, a British programmer who reviews escape rooms at his blog, The Logic Escapes Me, and who has been tracking their numbers since 2013, believes they sprang up independently in Hungary, Japan, and the United States before spreading quickly across the globe.

Although they have roots in haunted houses, game shows, and puzzle books, their most obvious ancestors are the digital escape games which fill mobile app stores – themselves descended from point-and-click adventure video games of the 1990s such as Myst and The 7th Guest. Yet where those were solitary and often finicky experiences, real-life escape rooms are fast, social, and physical. Instead of trawling your mouse back and forth in search of one rogue pixel, you pace about rummaging through desks and filing cabinets, shouting updates to your friends. At its best it feels like being inside an Indiana Jones film, playing through that inevitable scene where the protagonists must break open a sealed chamber using only an old notebook and their detailed if eccentric knowledge of Sumerian grain arbitrage.

It also does strange things to your brain. As you fumble and grasp the chain of logic which leads inexorably through the room to its exit, your focus starts to narrow. Call it puzzle vision: you tune out all extraneous detail, scanning every object for its potential relevance and dismissing it immediately if there is none. Even the most immaculately decorated escape rooms are not immune to this effect, their splendid recreations of Machiavelli’s library or Napoleon’s man-cave fading away as you search for The Answer. The trouble is that you have to stay mentally flexible, alive to the possibilities you haven’t considered, and therefore resisting this myopia is crucial to your success.

“When these rooms are well-designed, they are different worlds,” says David Spira, a web designer from the east coast of the US who has reviewed escape rooms across the world with his partner Lisa (the estimate of US escape room numbers used above is theirs). “For an hour we get to experience an adventure. There’s no small talk, no politics, and no drama. It’s simply the adventure and the puzzles.” Both were inveterate puzzle players before they met, and got hooked on them together; a bad room prompted them to start reviewing so they could warn others what to avoid.

“In terms of quality it is a big range,” says Ken Ferguson, a British programmer who reviews escape rooms on his blog, The Logic Escapes Me, and who has been tracking their numbers for the last several years. “I’d say there are probably only three or four that were really bad, and six or seven that are really outstanding. The very best ones are experiences – not puzzles primarily but performances.” The most common pitfalls are poor décor, illogical puzzles, and lacklustre game masters who do little to get you emotionally invested in the experience or who simply fail to explain things properly.

So do escape rooms primarily cater to hardcore puzzle freaks? It seems not: many venues rely on corporate groups or stag parties for their money, and not one designer I spoke to was able to pigeonhole their clientele. “People come to us for all kinds of occasions – company team building, friends, families, anything you could possibly imagine,” says Boris Kozma, an assistant manager at Room 33. “It does not cater to the audience of established gamers. It caters for everyone.”

All the world’s a stage

There is, however, another crucial branch in escape rooms’ intellectual family tree, which far fewer people will be aware of – and I found it in Brixton at a room called Oubliette.

From the outside it looked like a quiet souvenir shop, half-hidden round the corner from the Tube. Inside, though, we found a smoke-filled warren of old typewriters, Bakelite rotary phones and totalitarian propaganda. The concept was a 1984-style dystopia, in which we had to figure out the location of a trapped resistance agent from the clues he left in a locked office inside the "Ministry of Perception". But first we had to bargain our way in past an extremely grumpy bureaucrat, played by a real life actor.

That is because escape rooms are the latest arrival at an increasingly busy intersection between games and theatre. When you think about it these things have a lot in common. Both involve “players” (which after all was Shakespeare’s word for actor) taking an active role in bringing the story to life. Both invite their participants into a ritual space where the normal rules of life are suspended. And both involve investing ordinary objects and materials with a special significance: in theatre, as in football, a spot on the ground takes on significance its mere geography doesn’t warrant.

Over the past decade an increasing number of people from both fields have come to recognise this. From one side there is immersive theatre, a form of play in which the audience take an active role in the story as participants rather than bystanders. The most famous example is Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More – a non-linear adaptation of Macbeth where patrons wander freely through a baroquely creepy hotel, trying to figure out the various plot points unfolding through its guts – but similar ideas are visible in other “immersive” activities such as Secret Cinema.

On the other side, game creators have been trying for decades to integrate digital and physical play, a project which finally reached mass appeal this year with the success of Pokemon Go. Design collectives such as Hide and Seek and Haberdashery have devoted themselves to bringing live games – literally running around with your friends – back into adult life, with or without the aid of technology.

Oubliette’s designer, Minkette, is one of the key figures in this latter movement (she never gives her surname). Her career spans both these worlds: she has built sets for Punchdrunk and was one of the first members of Hide and Seek. She’s also worked on numerous alternate reality games (ARGs), vast mysteries with hundreds or thousands of players which unfold over a long period of time over “normal” channels such as email, web forums, and telephones. Perhaps her oddest claim to fame is as the inventor of Lemon Jousting, a surreal test of grace and self-control now played with fruit and wooden spoons at conferences and festivals across the world.

Like many designers, her interest in escape rooms began when she played her first – in this case during a road trip to Seattle. “It was fun, but it was pretty basic,” she tells me – “some shitty Ikea furniture, and there was a Sudoku in there. So as we were driving home everyone in the car was like, ‘this is what I would do different, this is what I would do different’, and by the time we got back to Portland we were going to make an escape room.”

With Oubliette – technically Escape From New Pelagia – Minkette wanted to replicate the richly detailed sense of place found in Punchdrunk plays. “The soundscapes they use to control your mood – the smell, all the textures, being able to explore these fully realised worlds – that’s something we wanted to bring to an escape room,” she says. “You feel like you’ve gone into this world which is self-contained, it’s real, and you’re just dropped into it.” Where many escape rooms require a certain suspension of disbelief – if I’m a jewel thief, who left me all these cryptic clues? And why is this safe unlocked via crossword? – Minkette aimed to give her puzzles a sense of internal consistency. Her go-to analogy is trying to figure out a ticket machine in a Hungarian subway station: you know this device has a purpose, and it surely makes sense to somebody somewhere, but that person is not you, and you’re left alone trying to wrangle with it like a Martian trying to figure out an iPod.

It works. Oubliette’s atmosphere was a league beyond almost anything else I played – with the exception of Time Run, which comes from a similar fusion of games and theatrics (its co-creator Josh Ford is best known for his indoor crazy golf club Swingers and his immersive festivals intended to convincingly recreate the 1960s, the 1920s, and the post-apocalyptic future). As the clock ticked down I found myself pretty much convinced, on a visceral level, that jackbooted goons were coming to get me. Sadly Oubliette closed down in June 2016. But it might be back one day, which is why I can’t tell you what happened after the lights went out.

Games, plays, immersive events: what all these activities share is a kind of contract between the designer and the audience – a shared commitment to sustaining the illusion. Sometimes that requires a little subterfuge on the designer's part.

Don’t tell me what to do

Behind the walls at Oubliette, in a cramped, dark space of switchboxes and corrugated plastic pipes, I am watching a group of people on CCTV.

Minkette is crammed in with me, along with two assistants in Soviet-looking work clothes. One of them sits at a Macbook with video feeds and a chat window, while the other stands by the door, ready to receive items from the players. All of us have to be very quiet, because the players are just feet away, and we can hear each other through a hole in the wall. That danger gives the scene a strange, voyeuristic intimacy; I feel like Ulrich Muhe in the German surveillance drama The Lives of Others, hiding in someone’s attic.

Most escape room venues have a space like this. Game masters don’t want their players to get stuck, and especially don’t want them to damage the room, so there is usually a system for monitoring their progress and giving them hints when they need them. Sometimes these hints exist “outside” of the story – Room 33, for example, gave us a walkie-talkie and three chances to use it. But in Oubliette they are part of the story: players must use a mocked-up vacuum tube system to contact a resistance member and bribe them with ration tokens.

’ve watched a completely different group of people doing the same things, saying the same words. I know all the plot points of this film, but the cast is different every single time

Minkette

Soon they send one through. Minkette and her assistants quietly confer. Then the laptop operator operator types into the chat window: “SECTOR ERROR.” Her words appear on a retro-looking computer inside the room. “They have to figure out how to use the hint system,” Minkette explains to me. “They did it slightly wrong, so we’re punishing them.” She grins. “We’re kind of mean.”

As the players pace and rummage, Minkette steps in with directions or corrections. Vacuum tubes are retrieved, emptied, filled and sent back. At one point she decides the players need a hint and dictates one to the operator. The players all crowd round their little computer, squeezed comically onto one CCTV screen, one of them reading the message out loud.

Minkette watches. “Come on, come on…”

“Okay,” says the man reading. “We’re looking for a page with an E at the top.”

“Yesss,” Minkette hisses, satisfied.

A good escape room makes you feel like your insights are totally your own. But in a good escape room, they usually aren’t. The experience is carefully calibrated so that thousands of people, week after week, hit the same solution and all feel that they’ve thought of it themselves. At a game design conference in south London, Minkette jokes about making her players feel like geniuses for opening a drawer, but she genuinely enjoys facilitating and watching that moment of “aha” satisfaction. “I’ve seen this gameplay happen over and over,” she tells the audience. “I’ve watched a completely different group of people doing the same things, saying the same words. I know all the plot points of this film, but the cast is different every single time…it’s such a wonderful thing to watch people do.”

To us all of these puzzles may seem perfectly logical and easy, because we made them, but to someone inside the room it can be extremely intimidating

Boris Kozma

Yet helping the players without making them feel coddled is a difficult balance. If you give too many hints, you ruin their chance to figure things out for themselves. If you give none, they might waste valuable time on a wild goose chase.

“We know the rooms are intimidating,” says Aurora Trentin, an Italian psychology student who was my game master at Room 33. “It takes a lot of time for a game master to master the skill of when to ask and then what to say. People generally think they have the right idea and want to pursue it.” At the same time, she says, it’s the groups who refuse to take hints who often wind up failing. Usually she offers unprompted advice early on through the walkie talkie just to remind the players that they have it and can use it.

Her manager, Boris Kozma, a former videogame designer from Serbia, expands: “We don’t want to obstruct their way of playing the game. We also don’t want them to think that they’re stupid for trying to do a certain thing. To us all of these puzzles may seem perfectly logical and easy, because we made them, but to someone inside the room it can be extremely intimidating and they don’t know what they’re doing. So calling out any of their actions, no matter how silly, is generally a really bad idea.”

The players are revolting

Not all players are as predictable as Minkette’s movie stars. When the best laid plans of puzzle designers meet with actual human beings, it gets messy.

For one thing, in a game where key clues are deliberately disguised as “natural” parts of the room, it can be hard to tell what’s part of the game and what’s not. In Bank Heist, I and my teammate spent several minutes trying to break open a little plastic box with our pens before the intercom buzzed and sternly told us to leave it alone. “But we’re criminals!” I protested to the camera. “It said ‘do not open’, so we opened!’” Few things are so destructive as the sheer, enthusiastic creativity of players who have been told that everything hides a secret; anything which can be broken will be broken. Ken Ferguson tells of a group who found a screwdriver inside an escape room. They had taken the walls apart and accessed the air conditioning before they realised it wasn’t part of the game.

Boris and Aurora have many stories. Of course there are the vandals, and the innocently confused redecorators (who put items in random places and wait for something to happen). Then there are the drunks – the hen or stag parties who come in steaming, enter the room, and just sit down and start giggling (or, indeed, fall asleep). But there are also some real oddballs. One of Aurora’s groups came into the laser room as normal, and the first player crawled through a gap. But then, instead of following him, his teammates just lay still while he grabbed them and dragged them across the floor as if they were sacks of potatoes.

Another team, says Boris, got into the main room, gathered up all of its items – including the furniture and a wall-mounted heater – and stuffed them inside the entrance tunnel. “How could you react? We were laughing because it’s something so weird and awkward. Why would you do that? The weirdest thing of all was that the items they needed were still in the tunnel, so every time they needed something they had to go back in.” Did he ask them why they did it? “No, er, no. We were like – ‘how did you find it? Did you have fun’?” The team was not successful.

At the other end of the spectrum are the expert escape artists. “You can spot them right away,” says Boris admiringly. “They’re really nice, but once they’re inside the room, the way they operate, it’s completely different. They will assess the situation immediately. Spread out, categorise everything, collect the items, and start making connections. It’s really impressive to watch a team like that work.” One of these groups was Ken Ferguson’s, which split up into two-man cells and spread out, dividing their attention but constantly communicating. “I did not tell them a single word during the game. I just let them alone.”

Such intense cooperation illustrates the other factor which complicates the relationship between designers and players: namely, the relationships between the players themselves.

Hell is other people

Escape rooms are social games. That means every team brings its own social dynamics along with it, and whatever tensions exist between its members outside the room will persist once inside it.

Sometimes this is positive. “We’ve had a surprising number of civil servants come and play,” Minkette tells her conference audience, to laughter. “They all do really well, possibly because they understand bureaucracy. Any team that has a project manager is definitely going to get out.” In fact, she says, the real game is not in the room but between you and these other people with whom you’ve chosen to lock yourself in it for an hour.

I think we’re getting to a point in society where material goods aren’t as important. People want memories, they want experiences

Ken Ferguson

But this can also lead some groups to implode under the pressure of the clock. “It’s usually families,” says Aurora. “You don’t really have an issue screaming at your family, so we see children yelling at parents, parents yelling at children, parents thinking they have the answer and us having to pitch in and say ‘um, listen to your son’. Boris, meanwhile, finds corporate groups awkward. “We usually advise managers to stay out of the room, but when they insist to stay inside the room they usually want to be the ones who want to lead the show, and everyone else is forced to go along with them.”

These relationships are so strong that one escape venue has actually monetised them. Daniela Strang, a former IT consultant who now runs Escape Entertainment in the City of London, and who designed Bank Heist, has set up a partnership with organisational psychologists who mine her rooms for corporate value.

Here’s how she explains it to me: let’s say PwC or McKinsey want to do a team building event for their client, but they also want to get something out of it. Perhaps the client company has just merged with another, or merged two of its offices, and the two groups of people aren’t quite gelling with each other yet. So they all go and run an escape room together, and while inside they are observed by a corporate trainer. Afterwards, they go through a feedback session where they all talk about what happened and how they worked with each other, allowing the trainer to point out and (ideally) resolve points of tension or friction. Perhaps one of them is always taking charge without warrant, and the others resent it. Perhaps another figured out the solution early but didn’t suggest it; turns out they often have good ideas that nobody ever asks them about. “It really gives the team and the company a lot of value to walk away from,” says Daniela. “People are seeing this as just an hour of fun, but it can also be an hour of education.”

Another application is recruitment. Strang works with HRS, a science recruiting consultancy founded by Apprentice contestant Rickty Martin. You apply for the big job, you do the interviews and the group assessment day, and then at the end you all go out together to have some fun. But recruiters are watching you play, assessing how you work with others.

The secret of success

The big question about escape rooms is: why have they only taken off now? It’s a simple concept, so why is Ken Ferguson’s graph so steep?

“I think we’re getting to a point in society where material goods aren’t as important,” Ken tells me. “People want memories, they want experiences. The materials you need to live, most people can afford. And people are thinking, ‘well, I can buy more worldly goods, but actually what I want is to not fill up my house with all those things but to have more memories, more experiences’. And your life is full of TVs, mobile phones, tablets and computers; you’ve got these screens all the time. There’s a certain instinct to break from that, go off the grid as it were.”

There are also practical factors. The rise of TripAdvisor – and, yes, smartphones – means escape rooms are easier to find. Their owners can save money on marketing by using word of mouth and on rent by setting up in obscure locations and relying on mapping apps to bring their customers in. Meanwhile, Minkette credits cheap, simple computers such as the Rasberry Pi or the Arduino series, and the DIY electronics movements which drove them, for making it much easier for ordinary people to build circuits and sensors – to “create magic tricks in the real world”.

More philosophically, Boris Kozma wonders if the success of escape rooms might be part of a more general cultural turn towards childlike things, in which cartoons, video games, and dragon-heavy fantasy have all gone mainstream. “For the longest time there was a stigma,” he says. “But nobody really cares about that anymore. Today if you say you’re going to play a round of D&D, it’s like, ‘oh cool, awesome’, instead of ‘oh, you’re a creeper in your mother’s basement.’”

He might be right. I play a lot of videogames and board games, and for the past five years on the fringes of those cultures I’ve noticed new enthusiasm for shared social play. It owes a lot to people like Minkette and their quest to bring play back into public space, but it’s even wider than that: my board game collection has transformed from a mild embarrassment into an object of curiosity, while “megagames” – giant roleplaying sessions involving anything from 20 to 300 players – have taken off after decades of obscurity. People are much more willing than they used to be to engage in playful activity, face to face with friends or strangers. Escape rooms seem like the culmination – a well-deserved if slightly unexpected breakout success for a movement which has been bubbling along for some time.

In major cities like London, all these factors – smartphone ennui, a hunger for change, and the rise of internet reviewing – combine to democratise hipsterism, crowdsourcing the work of urban discovery. That in turn has created a wide class of tolerably affluent dilettantes who pride themselves on seeking out new experiences and are ironically empowered to do so by the same omnipresent hyperconnectedness from which they are perpetually seeking an escape. It is a perfect storm of demographics, economics, and electronics.

Having solved that mystery, what should the ambitious escapee know? First, do your research: escape rooms differ in their intensity, challenge, and use of actors, and many are unsuitable for wheelchair users or people with impaired movement. But research and discovery is part of the fun, and sites like Ken Ferguson’s and the Spiras’ will help you assess rooms in advance without spoiling their secrets. Second, try not to worry about losing; you’ll only make yourself feel bad and many rooms are almost as fun to fail at as they are to beat. Third, know that escape rooms aren’t for everybody. Indeed you probably have some idea by now whether they’re your cup of tea. But you can’t always know until you’ve tried one. Indeed, you may soon become one of the dozens of people who have quit unrelated jobs after playing one because they were so enchanted by the concept.

My final piece of advice is to look at the fan. Hopefully you'll know l know what I mean when the time comes. Which room am I talking about? That would be telling.