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Bonus Funtime Game Show Challenge. The Treehouse Raid at Fort Knocks. Ghosts in The Graveyard.
Now while these might sound like the latest primetime TV lineup, I assure you it’s not, it’s something better, something you can experience without being behind a screen. These are actually the names of Chicago area escape rooms.
Since the first permanent US escape room opened in 2012 in San Francisco, escape rooms have been a constant part of our culture. And with a good mix of puzzles and plot, there’s often something for everyone, whether they are total die-hard fans or complete newbies.
Communication senior Drew Slager skews towards the more devoted end of the spectrum. He has completed 15 rooms and currently is in the process of creating his own called Locus which will open its doors to the Northwestern campus this fall.
DREW SLAGER: I love puzzles. I love doing them with my friends, my parents and I used to do escape rooms all the time back when I lived with them. It’s always a fun activity to do with family or friends.
Brian Lee can attest to this widespread appeal, as the co-owner of Lock Chicago, an Evanston escape room.
BRIAN LEE: We get so many different groups: a lot of corporate groups, from a lot of just high school students, obviously, Northwestern people, Bears players, and just a whole bunch of different types of dynamics.
But with so many different people coming to their rooms, including many returning folks like Slager, a distinct challenge arises.
JONATHAN BIAG: there’s only a certain number of puzzles out there in the world
That’s Jonathan Biag, the co-owner of Escape Factor, an escape room in Forest Park.
BIAG: The job for escape room creators or escape room puzzle creators is to take one of those puzzles and disguise it as something different that people may have not seen before.
According to Biag, there are really only 7 to 10 different types of puzzles out there. So..then how do you keep things new and exciting? Well, you find a theme that allows you to incorporate these puzzles in new and inventive ways. Here’s Biag again.
BIAG: when I was a kid, I used to be all around computers. I was always playing computer games, played things like King’s Quest, Myst, Zork. Finally in 2016 or so, I found out about these games and I went and played it. I’m like, oh my gosh, this is the computer games I used to play as a kid in real life.
Bane Srdjevic, the other co-owner of Lock Chicago, incorporates a similar childhood passion into his rooms.
BANE SRDJEVIC: Drew a lot of inspiration from things that I saw as a kid. I was a big movie buff. Specifically from adventure movies like The Mummy. And then kind of took a step back to say, Okay, I really like how this worked in this movie. What can I do to make this interactive?
For Lock Chicago, Srdjevic took his love of movies and his technical mindset and turned it into one of his favorite escape room elements
SRDJEVIC: Inspired by a scene from The Mummy, where in order to illuminate a tomb, they have to bounce light off of these mirrors, and the light eventually illuminates the tomb. I built this contraption in the middle that had eight mirrors mounted on towers and a laser that you have to kind of guide and you have to unlock and orient the mirrors in order to create light patterns, in order to solve puzzles.
But it takes more than a showstopping element to put together a stellar escape room.
DEXTER CURA: We always have in mind that we’re going to build a room for a group of people that have all different strengths
That’s Dexter Cura, the co-owner of Escape Factor.
CURA: We’ve gotten into escape rooms where you literally could be, we call them kind of like, uh, Ninjas, where somebody could solve something and not tell anyone. But what we like to do is make sure that we build in puzzles that require group activity.
So to make a quote-un-quote “un-ninja-able” room, one must play to various strengths from math to optical illusions when designing to make sure everyone gets a hand in the escape.
But game designers can only do so much to ensure success. At the end of the day it comes down to the participants, and boy do these owners have stories to tell. Here’s Lee again.
LEE: We try to keep that we always maintain so strong game integrity, but we always want to make sure people have fun So we’ve had people call ahead and try to ask for hits right to make themselves like a little smarter for their date
But by and large, cheating in the name of love isn’t the case for most games and participants. However, after years of watching from behind the camera, Lee has discovered a common pitfall.
LEE: It’s kind of a lack of communication. When we used to do public rooms, before COVID, we actually saw that public rooms had an actual higher escape rate than private groups.
His co-owner Srdjevic can offer a reason why this is.
SRDJEVIC: Those rooms almost never fell into this trap because they were much more polite to each other.
And this willingness to have an open mind, to experiment, and to play, is part of what makes a great escape room experience.
SRDJEVIC: The first thing we tell people, if you’re going to go into an escape room, you don’t know the answer. The game master knows the answer. The person next to you doesn’t know the answer. You don’t know the answer. So, if somebody says something, you might as well give it a shot.
And more than anything, you have to be able to be perceptive. Here’s Slager again.
SLAGER: Just looking at what’s in the room. If there’s like drawings or anything that looked like it could be like a symbol or a code that’s important to know. One of my favorite things to do is looking upside down cause usually there would be something like under a chair or under a table or something else and so that’s always fun to look for. But I’d say just look at everything because the sooner you lock in on something, you’re missing something else.
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And while being in any sort of entertainment business is never easy, especially considering the last several years of uncertainty mainly stemming from COVID-19, these escape room artists are determined to keep innovating and creating and bringing their best to the people of Chicago and beyond. Here’s Biag again.
BIAG: It’s from a love of puzzles and from the love of experience that we do this. So, when we see, when we watch these groups come in and play our rooms, And they play, perfect, or not even perfectly, but they just have so much fun moving from puzzle to puzzle and at the end you just see their excitement and you can tell that they loved every moment of it. It’s just really, it’s a great feeling to watch people go through our creation and get as much or even more joy than we got coming up with this stuff in the first place. And I think that’s part of the reason we like building these rooms. We like sharing our love of puzzles with other people.
If you’re interested and want to try escaping these rooms for yourself, you can visit Lock Chicago in Evanston, Escape Factor in Forest Park, or Drew Slager’s Locus December 5-7th at Shanley Pavilion at Northwestern.
For WNUR News, I’m Sophia Casa.
