Escape Room

[Guest]

Mrs. Carb and I have been looking for more than the typical dinner and movie date night.  Tonight we tried an Escape Room.  These are places where you are placed in a room with clues to find your way out.  We looked around town and found that they tend to be between $23 to $35 per person for what should take about an hour or less.  I don't know why my wife thought it would be great to start our first one with the toughest puzzle at this particular site.  It turned out to be very frustrating, but very entertaining.

If anyone is interested in the adventure I'm going to do a walkthrough of the puzzle we went through.  You'll see why it was so frustrating.  There was a lot of misdirection (red herrings) and a bunch of less obvious clues that I don't know how anyone would get without already knowing some of the solutions.  My wife was very handy because she had done some cipher work before.  She saw things no one else did.

WARNING! SPOILERS!  duh!

We are put into a completely darkened room.  1st, find a flashlight.  I reached for my belt pouch.  Oops.  I used my flashlight the other night when the freezing temperatures burst a pipe outside and I had to fix it in the dark and frozen Houston weather.  I didn't put it back in my pouch.  Everyone was wandering around looking for it.  I remembered seeing something small and black in the corner just before they shut the door on us.  I stepped over and picked it up.  Yup.  Flashlight.  Black light bulb.

Look around the room.  We see a pvc pipe with a loop around the end.  Shine the flashlight and notice that the tip has fluorescent pink paint on it.  On the wall is an old bloodied shirt, worn pants, a pair of antlers.  Next to it on the wall was a box.  Slide open the door to find that there is a chart with what looked like a circuit board code on it.

On the ceiling we see six numbers.

On the other wall, we find a cloth hanging on the wall.  Lift it up and we see a 6x6 opening into the next room.  The door leading out has a keypad.  On the wall next to the door is another keypad.  Near this second keypad is an electrical box.

So, we used the clues on the circuit board code to operate the electrical box.  It turns on the light.

In the pants on the wall, we found a paper with descriptions of body parts.

We shine the flashlight through the wall opening and find something off the wall with pink fluorescent paint.  Use the pole to pull on it.  A tiny door swings revealing four numbers.  We try it on the door.  Nothing.  We try it on the second keypad and the lights go off and a hatch from above opens dropping fake body parts all around us.

The flashlight again is used to place the body parts in the order that the sheet of paper indicates.  We find numbers on each of these body parts.  Use those numbers on the door's keypad.  Opens.

In this next room we see a kitchenette with a table a knife (plastic) and a wooden kama (mini-sickle).  A chair.  A cabinet with some jars preserving different human organs with names and dates.

poke, prod, push, slide... and pull... out a piece of the left hand side of the mantle above the fireplace.  We slide it's conjugate on the right hand side, revealing a button deep in a hole.  The left mantle piece is a perfect fit.  We push and the fireplace pops only a little bit.  Nothing else does anything.  Finally fiddling with the button enough opens the fireplace fully.

Near the fireplace is a bellows locked to the wall in a framework with a North/South/East/West lock.

In the third room we see a padlock to a little cabinet, a skeleton, and a padlock to the exit door.  We can't see anything here.  The skeleton has a series of numbers written on it.  Too many to be used on the padlocks.

We go back to the second room and find a piece of plastic tubing.

We notice that there are three panels with nozzles that the plastic tubing would fit into.  Thus cluing us into the fact that we need this bellows to work it.

The bloodied shirt from the first room is supposed to be placed on the skeleton.  The holes on the shirt reveal the four numbers to be used on the lock to the small cabinet in the third room.  It reveals another piece of tubing.

Look at the pants and realize there are only two numbers on the skeleton legs and neither of them show up via the holes in the pants.  We note that the pants have "no, no, no" written on them.  I guess that's supposed to mean the pants are not a clue.  Little did we know that the belt on the pants was the clue.

Under the table is a hidden drawer with a padlock.  We're supposed to take the belt (which has numbers written on it.  We're supposed to wrap it around one of the table legs at just the right place where four numbers will line up, revealing the code for the padlock.  It reveals a diary and another plastic tube.

We read the diary and we think we're getting clues from it.  But it turns out it is a red herring.

Instead, we're supposed to organize the jars into date order.  Then we need to recognize that on the underside of the lids are pictures/images drawn on them.  Wolf, lantern, lantern, pulley.  Turns out that over the mantle these correspond to a down, up, up, right pattern.  We use that on the N/S/E/W lock.  It opens and allows us to use the bellows.  

This is where we got stuck and ran out of time.   We simply couldn't see where we were supposed to put it.  We tried the hoses, the nozzles, the sink, the locks, everything we could think of.  NOTHING.

The overseer came in and told us where to put it.  Not only was it a spot so out of the way that none of us even saw it, but it was so camouflaged that even after he showed it to us, I couldn't see it.  I thought it was a knot in the wood.

So we start blowing.  Then is a long and tedious process of seeing where on the three panels the air was coming out of the nozzles.  We hook up the hoses one at a time.  Then we need to flip a light switch that seemed to do nothing when we first got there.  This lights up the numbers in the ceiling of the first room.  They were all of different colors.  Three of the colors matched the colors of the nozzle panels.  Enter those numbers into the final padlock.  And we're free.

Uhgh...

Now, this took my wife's knowledge of ciphers to do several of these things.  It took the father of the other family who joined us in this puzzle to reach far enough with the pvc pole through the 6x6 opening.  My pattern recognition.  AND the overseer had to show us where the bellows needed to go.  

I guess it would have been a little too easy if there were no red herrings.  But it took way too long to figure out what was a real clue and what was a red herring.  I honestly don't know how anyone who didn't know exactly what to look for could have gotten through it.  The bellows was a major roadblock.

We used up all three of our clues and we needed a fourth to find out where the bellows was supposed to go.  And there was no way we were figuring it out without knowing that.  All the other clues, eventually seemed obvious.  But neither we nor the other family had ever done these before.  So, we didn't know what to expect.

One thing was that we figured that once we were out of the first room, we didn't need anything there.  For instance, I thought if the shirt and belt from the pants were clues, the antlers must be as well.  Nope.  Red herring.  They were just decoration.  As was the chair, the knife, the kama, the several other cabinets and other pieced of decoration.  There was a clock on the wall with a number missing.  We thought that would be a clue.  Nope.  Just a design flaw in a cheap piece of decoration.

In the end, I told our overseer that I was kind of glad that it took the full hour.  If we had done it in 10 minutes, it would have been an awful lot of money for just 10 minutes of entertainment.  But on the other hand, I don't think we should have had this puzzle be our first ever puzzle.

Thinking back on it, one stumbling block was that none of us had the experience of using a bellows on a fireplace.  The location where this opening was would have been typical of that type of opening.  But not being familiar with such openings, it simply didn't occur to anyone in the room.

Edited January 9, 2018 by Guest

[Just_A_Guy]

There’s one in Provo that my in-laws dragged me to last year.  I’m not really into puzzles; but for those who like that sort of thing, I’d say it’s just the sort of thing they would like.  

[Sunday21]

@Carborendum. How cool! Thanks for posting!

[anatess2]

My kids' best friend spent his birthday party taking all his guests to an Escape Room.  There were 10 boys, ages 12-16.  I don't know what level puzzle they went through but the only person whose ever been to an Escape Room was the birthday celebrant but he went through a different puzzle.  They escaped their puzzle within the allotted hour!  My kids loved it and want to do another one but you have to reserve the place weeks in advance!  New thing in town and all that.

[bytebear]

I've considered doing these.  I've downloaded many of the "Can You Escape?" phone games, and they are quite entertaining.

[seashmore]

We did one for our work's Christmas party, except it wasn't exactly an Escape situation. Which made it good for those who are prone to claustrophobia, anxiety, etc. We split up into departments, and mine was assigned the "task" of foiling Lincoln's assassination by finding a key to unlock the cabinet with the gun. It reflected our group dynamic rather accurately. We started off working together, but TM2 got frazzled and hyper-focused on something that wasn't relevant, our Manager did things on her own most of the while, TM4 took on an air of authority but was often misguided (if not wrong), TM3 tried to bridge all the gaps and made some progress, and I mostly milled about for the last twenty minutes after I realized no one was either talking to or listening to me.

[alexbrown]

_{^{Yesterday we also tried such an activity as an escape room. Overall it was just unforgettable. We ordered our room by the link . The puzzles challenging enough. We did the the room and accomplished it in 56 mins with 2 clues and with just 2 people.}} 

Edited February 11, 2018 by alexbrown

[zil]

2 hours ago, alexbrown said:

Tomorrow we also tried such an activity as an escape room.

Wow, the future past tense. Could you maybe PM me the next super lottery winning number?