The timer started when the door closed, and for a moment it was very confusing.
Inside Puzzled Escape Games’ first escape room, the Advocate staff stood frozen like the Scooby-Doo gang before a haunted house — silent, wide-eyed, and a little hungry (it was dinner time). The large, dark green room with high ceilings had a wall-sized book shelf, desk, mirror, and painting, as well as a few end tables and chairs. Inside, somewhere, were clues and puzzles to crack that, if solved in time, would lead to our escape and the whereabouts of the “Missing Professor.”
A few months ago, filmmakers Tom Dahl, his sister Lise Lawrence, and husband and wife Dahl [?] Erik Rossavik and Florence Gaven Rossavik used their scriptwriting and set design skills to open Puzzled Escape Games in the Eastworks Building on Pleasant Street in Easthampton. It’s the first escape room in the Valley and an exciting new addition to the regular night-out line up of movies, eats, and shows — most of which require sitting down for the entire experience.
Escape rooms are physical. Players are invited to touch and move items around. Though the nearest escape room to Puzzled is in Worcester, this type of live adventure game is gaining popularity in large cities across the globe. Toronto is the international capital of escape rooms, says Dahl, who fell in love with escape rooms after a couple of visiting friends took him on a trip to Boston to play a round.
“I was traveling far and wide to do them, and I thought this is something the Valley doesn’t have and I think people would really like it,” Dahl says.
Escape rooms share some common characteristics, but each one is different. Just about every escape room begins with a story setting up the mystery players must solve. Then two to 10 players enter a room tricked out with all kinds of hidden clues, riddles, puzzles, and logic problems to solve. Once those are completed the players are free to go — maybe.
Playing an escape room invokes creativity and make believe. It feels like you’re a character in a mystery novel, or what I imagine being in a video game would feel like — Portal, to be exact.
Members of the Advocate staff: myself, art and production manager Jennifer Levesque, and staff writer Peter Vancini, attempted to escape Puzzled’s room last week. It costs $25 per player and the game is open Wednesday through Sunday. It’s best to make a game reservation in advance.
So far, of the nearly 120 groups who have played the “Missing Professor,” only 14 percent have escaped.
“The larger groups are usually the ones that do best,” Dahl says. “You need a mix of solvers and seekers; solvers to solve the problems and seekers to find them.”
The Advocate team entered the escape room with no instructions. It was thrilling to step into a room and have no idea what was going to happen next, with nothing but your wits and experience to guide you — plus, up to three clues, if players wish, from Dahl.
We started by looking around, picking up candles and books, checking under chairs and collecting all the odd symbols and items that didn’t belong in a regular living room. The three of us crowded around the first puzzle we uncovered, staring and not saying much beyond, “uh,” “um,” “huh?” Then we broke apart to search for more clues and request some oddball knowledge from each other as we each attempted to tackle different problems.
“Can anyone name an animal with a lot of backbone?”
“Are there other words for ‘wipe’ we haven’t thought of?”
“Which way is north?”
“Why isn’t the door opening?”
When we finished a handful of puzzles with 10 minutes left on the clock, Vancini began to clean up the room and I was feeling smug when suddenly the room changed and we all realized there was much, much more work to be done if we were ever going to save the professor. Scrambling, we checked all the corners and spots that might have still held clues as the clock ticked down the final seconds.
Yeah, we lost.
The door opened and Dahl walked in. He said we had about 15 minutes left of the game to still play. For players who don’t escape the room, Puzzled offers two options: if players make it at least halfway through the game, Dahl will tell them how the puzzle is solved and how the story ends, or he won’t say a word and players can return for half price and try to escape the room again.
For the article, Dahl let us bumble around the room trying to figure out the rest of the puzzles after the clock ran out. With six more hints from Dahl we were able to escape the room in a total of just two and a half hours. Still, I was buzzing with adrenaline and a happy sense of accomplishment. But I was also ready for a burger and a beer. The game was mentally taxing.
In June, Puzzled Escape Games will open a second room, “Escape from Escobar’s,” which begins with players handcuffed to each other. I’m already thinking about going, but for people who are unsure about investing an hour in the experience, Puzzled Escape Games has a demo escape in the lobby. A player sits in a chair in the open office with his hand chained to a desk.
As the story goes: the player has been arrested by a crooked cop for a crime he didn’t commit. The officer has left the desk for a moment and the player must use this time to escape using only the materials he can find on the desk. It takes most people about 8 or 10 minutes to escape, Dahl says.
Contact Kristin Palpini at editor@valleyadvocate.com.
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