ESCAPE-PADES
San Jose succumbs to inescapable appeal of team-oriented, puzzle-based challenge rooms
There were plenty of “aha!” breakthroughs on Sunday at an unassuming office space on South 1st Street, where on Sunday Neha Kapadia became the family pack leader as they valiantly tried to solve the riddles that would decipher the puzzles to reveal a key to escape a locked room.
They tried and tried and a lastminute hustle got them into a second chamber — a little alcove with
“It’s a new form of game and people like challenges ... I think it will be around for some time.” — Sean Lung, owner of San Jose Room Escape
a cipher on the wall and bloody handprints on the ceiling — but ultimately they failed to get their hands on the key before the hour was up.
And that put them in the majority: Out of the 2,342 groups who have taken the challenge of “The Mysterious Room” since it opened in 2014, 217 have succeeded — a 9 percent solve rate.
“I don’t know if we were pretty close or not,” said Kapadia, who previously played three similar escape games in San Francisco but has yet to claim a victory. “Maybe if we had another 10 minutes? These games are all so different, it’s hard to compare them to each other. But this one was tough.”
Co-founder Chris Graham said they teamed with Japanese publishing company SCRAP — which invented the game in 2007 and opened the first United States venue in San Francisco in 2012 — to bring one to San Jose after realizing the corporate potential.
“They were doing really well with tourists,” Graham said, “and I told them that I used to work in tech, and tech companies would pay tons of money for this kind of experience. Silicon Valley was ideal for an escape room.”
His business partner Janice Loh said San Jose “needed this kind of thing.”
“We brought it here, and now we’ve seen a lot of other companies move down,” she said. “It really is a great experience, it gets people interacting, working together face-toface. It gets people off their phones — gets them doing something physical, and that’s different than digital.”
Now, Real Escape Game is one of several such operations in the South Bay, all with differing themes. There’s Escape Game 911 with a police interrogation room motif, a Castle Escape Room, an Escape the Mad Hatter version.
Sean Lung, who runs the San Jose Room Escape with Alcatraz and myth themes, said they get the company teambuilding expeditions during the week — Facebook and Costco recently came through — and the friends and family bonding on weekends.
“It’s a new form of game and people like challenges,” Lung said. “I think it will be around for some time — it’s really fun for young people and families and for the companies.”
Know who else thinks it’s fun? Former president Barack Obama, who took his daughters to Breakout: Waikiki on Christmas Eve after the venue sent him a Twitter challenge.
“Hey @POTUS,” it tweeted almost exactly one year before, “if you think running a country is hard, try breaking out of one of our rooms! #WambachDidIt #BringMichelle #ShesYourOnlyHope.”
The Obamas got out with 12 seconds to spare, with Malia reportedly the team’s MVP.
While there haven’t been any sightings of President Trump at an escape room, one did open in Calgary with a theme of “Escape Trump’s Tower.”
“This room is rated for mature audiences only,” cautions the website. “Some participants may find subject matter in this room offensive. All characters depicted in this room are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental.”
The escape room came about in a reversal of horse and cart — instead of a video game based on the real world, the actual physical escape room was modeled after online puzzles that have been around for decades. In those, players click through a virtual reality, inspecting objects in a given space for clues and using them to solve an overarching conundrum and gain egress.
The real-world version has parties manhandling a room’s furniture. Rugs are flipped, drawers are pulled out and poked at. Chairs are taken apart. Tables that aren’t supposed to be taken apart are inspected to see if they can be taken apart. The legally required fire extinguisher on a wall is eyed suspiciously — could that actually be a prop, too?
Cheyenne Meakim, 22, who was the room’s host, told the player that no, the extinguisher would yield no clues so leave it be. Part of her job is to make sure players don’t wreck things that aren’t supposed to be ruined.
“Some people are better at finding things, others are more puzzle oriented,” she said. “But by the end of the game, everything in this room will be turned upside down or inside out.”
For a comprehensive list of escape rooms, visit http://escaperoomdirectory.com/