ESC-IT: Escape Boredom by Escaping the Room

You’re standing with a group of four other friends. You’re in a room and lo and behold, you have been locked in. Seemingly random objects lie hidden in corners and in plain sight. The key is hidden somewhere in the room, more than likely locked in a box needing several clues to open it.

On the wall is a timer. You have 45 minutes to find it.

No, this isn’t Saw. It’s ESC-IT, an Escape the Room game which has been taking Toronto by storm in the last few months. For the unfamiliar, the game involves solving a series of puzzles in a themed room. Your goal is to…well…solve the puzzles and escape the room in 45 minutes.

Basically, it’s a live action adventure game and one I have been itching to experience since I first heard about it. I finally got the chance last night and headed up with a group of friends, including Geekpron’s own Rob and Debi, and the musical duo of Debs and Errol! It was actually Errol who first clued us into ESC-IT, as he had been once before (check out his blog post here!)

ESC-IT, located in Markham, ON, currently has six themed rooms of varying difficulty you can try out. Groups are capped off at a maximum of five people per room. We ended up splitting into two groups of four. Debi headed off to Bedroom Nightmare while we headed off to the Cryptic Cellar.

And I have to say…it was an absolute blast. I’ll admit I was a little nervous at first, not knowing what to expect as our guide led us into the room and gave us the grisly backstory of how we came to be locked in there before closing the door behind him and leaving us to our own devices. But those worries soon melted into excitement.

We quickly proceeded to tear the room apart in search of clues. Our room was dimly lit and so we were given a flashlight to search out the darker corners with more ease. Soon ideas were flying back and forth between us: someone found a box! How do we open it? What are these symbols? Does that thing on the wall have any significance? What about this other thing on the floor?

And as all of us searched for clues, tried to crack locks, or search an object for the twentieth time in a row, the timer behind us ticked down. Every puzzle that we solved was met with cheers from everyone in the room, followed by sighs of frustration when we realized solving that clue simply led to another clue.

We asked for a hint when we got absolutely stumped on one puzzle (everyone is allowed one clue during their session). Even then, we sat huddled around our box trying desperately to figure out the solution to open it.

Finally, with two minutes left on our timer, we miraculously got the key to the door and rushed to open it. As we turned the key, we screamed in triumph, more than likely shocking the poor folks waiting their turn. In the end, we got to go up on the wall of fame.

If you’re looking for a great activity for you and your friends, ESC-IT is a fantastic experience. It’s best played with four or five people: just enough to get the brain juices flowing and get a good coverage of the room in the least amount of time, but also not so many that there’s too many opinions being shouted out.

For those who are nervous about any scares that might happen within the room or having to run an obstacle course to get to a clue, they needn’t be worried. ESC-IT is purely about puzzle solving and has no physical requirements or unnecessary scares. And as a safety precaution, there is a button you can press on the inside of the door to ask for help as well as an emergency key should something come up.

If you don’t happen to solve everything once the timer is up, the guide will come in and show you what was missed and the solutions you needed. But even if you don’t succeed, it’s still a ton of fun and my friends and I laughed afterwards at just how long it took us to figure out some of the puzzles.

If you’re a puzzle lover or even just looking for something new to do with friends, ESC-IT is definitely a great way to pass the time and I would highly suggest checking it out as soon as you can. Normally it goes for about $20 per person, but if you pay in cash you get 20% off AND if you check in with Facebook you get an additional 20% off! There really isn’t beating that kind of deal. Plus you might even see us on the Wall of Fame!