Great escape rooms: Team puzzles soaring in popularity
Smarty Pantz the latest offering in trend that sees video games puzzles come to life
Five more minutes and fellow Province reporter Nick Eagland and I could have solved Morning Never Comes. We were so, so close. Yet morning didn’t dawn.
The easiest of the escape-room challenges at Smarty Pantz proved to be a puzzle beyond our skills.
Located in a heritage building in Gastown, Smarty Pantz was founded in February by “chief fun officers” Chris Ricard and Dan Civiero.
It’s the first downtown Vancouver location of a burgeoning entertainment experience for the 18-to-35 demographic: the escape room.
At Smarty Pantz, you ring the bell and climb an appropriately cinematic winding staircase to enter the facility.
In a waiting room filled with classic puzzles, a giant Jenga set and Mad Men-era beauty-bar beehive hair dryer seats (complete with ashtrays), you meet your host and choose your escape-room adventure.
Adventures range from the Scooby Doo-ish Morning Never Comes, the noir-esque Spies & Lies, the classic slasher nasty Thirst for Murder and the ultra-challenging, self-explanatory Doomed Submarine.
The surreal Dreamscape opens later this month.
“Other places are more about locking you in a room and having you solve puzzles,” says Civiero.
“We don’t lock you in. We give you a completely developed front-toback storyline with participating actors providing occasional cues to get you further immersed in it.”
“The main thing we wanted was to differentiate from the usual horror-murder-mayhem rooms and do something more whimsical, funny and even silly,” says Ricard. “But they are all still very challenging to solve.” Nick and I will attest to that. You really need your wits about you. An escape room would not be a good idea after a few rounds at a club.
All of the rooms at Smarty Pantz were designed and built by professional film, TV and theatre designers. The puzzles and solutions were developed by specialists. Stories run 45 minutes from start to finish.
As my colleague and I discovered, once you’ve surrendered your cellphone (a house rule), you become extremely involved in the proceedings. Absence of email improves focus.
“Normally, we recommend groups six to a maximum of 15 for the experience,” says Civiero.
“It becomes a collaborative thing where you need to work together,” says Ricard. “Obviously, we looked at our location with the potential for corporate business in mind.”
The generally accepted lore on the origins of the escape-room phenomenon is that it’s another example of post-digitalism. Something online moves off-line and becomes an analog experience.
Silicon Valley likely spawned the first escape-room example.
Puzzles have always been a popular video game focus. But in the early 2000s, “escape-the-room” games, complete with all of the graphic and narrative content you would expect with other adventure games, exploded in popularity in Japan.
Titles such as Nintendo DS’s 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, where you become a character trying to escape a sinking cruise ship, were huge.
Their reliance on logical reasoning and problem-solving to resolve the challenge was welcome relief from the heaps of first-person shooter titles on the market.
There is an obsessive online escape-game community. Sites such as addictinggames.com feature 157 escape games ranging from the obvious (Alcatraz Escape) to more whimsical (Sarcastic Cat Escape).
By 2010, “real life” escape rooms were popping up all over Japan, China and Taiwan. North America and Europe followed suit and a number of international firms such as Hint-Hunt and Puzzle Break franchise globally. Sociologists attribute the popularity of escape rooms to everything from people’s need to “escape” urban density in Hong Kong to a desire to relieve pressures of economic stress in Japan. They also happen to be a lot of fun.
Go to Smarty Pantz.ca for hours. Book “from your rotary phone” at 604-974-9293 or email cu@Smarty Pantz.ca. Follow on all the usual social media. Average cost is $25/person.