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| My 45th Birthday party! I invited friends to join in a group activity I've wanted to do since I heard about it. It's a mystery room escape. |
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| In a number of cities in China (and probably around the world), game designers have designed a physical puzzle where you and a group of friends pick a mission (our's was number 9, the Alcatraz Island), which according to Onions was medium level in difficulty. |
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| To preserve the integrity of the game, all cell phones and/or cameras are locked up before entering. In addition, everyone is scanned with a wand before entering as well. Here's the layout of our puzzle. |
The twelve of us divided ourselves into groups of six and
entered our respective jail rooms. Then
the jail doors were locked and the clock started counting down from 60 minutes.
My group was in jail room 1. In each jail room was a sink, a toilet, a lock box
and a poster on the wall with certain letters of words highlighted.
We found a key and magnet in our toilet and the other group
found a key as well. We then determined
that our key opened their box and that the letters on the two posters were
color-coded and were the four digits we needed to open our lock. Inside we
found a hex wrench and a uv-light and they found a flashlight and a turnkey
that we could use on our floor. We
passed the items across to each other. We use the turnkey and unscrew the thing
on our floor but find nothing. We had no
idea what it signified or the result of the unlocking of the thing on the
floor. But within a minute the other
group in room two had found that their sink was actually a door, it opened up
and all of a sudden they disappeared through their wall into what I’m calling
the puzzle room. The six of us on our
side were left trying to find our escape from our jail room. Our thought was
that we could find a code that would work on the numeric pad on our jail door.
Unfortunately, we spent the next thirty minutes trying to determine what that
code was. We looked everywhere, tried to decipher numbers from the poster, even
finding numbers written on the spigot of the faucet on our sink. Nothing worked. During our attempts to find a code, we the
other group would occasionally come back and check on us and ask us to pass
them items that we had.
Then, with some 30 minutes to go, Onions comes running back
with a four digit code and it opens our door and we all spill out into the
corridor between the two cells and are faced with another door with a keypad
that leads into the hallway. Stumped again, we are fixated on the code, but in
that corridor we find another turnkey, which we give to the other group and
they go back through the wall and are working on the puzzles from their
side. It’s clear that the other group
having a blast on their side as we hear yelling and screaming and the
occasional, “WOAH!” Nothing is working and we’re stuck wandering between our
cell and the corridor. So with 10 minutes to go, we flag the staff and ask for
a hint. He tells us to push on the walls…which we do and lo and behold, our
room begins to PHYSICALLY slide away from the entrance wall. Then where the ceiling
is exposed we see a hole in the ceiling, which leads to a ceiling passageway.
Then I notice on the exposed floor where our room used to be is ANOTHER
turnkey. I hope over and pick it up and pass it up to one of my teammates that
is already through the ceiling and he passes it to one of the members of the
other jail cell. Our groups have met
up! That turnkey I found opens the door
in the ceiling where our groups meet.
From the small corridor we climb down a ladder back down to the level of
the room and then find….the water room.
This long room has a bunch of tubes in which there appear to be bodies
and from our side to the far side of the room is a shallow pool of water. There are five minutes on the clock. One of
the other side brings over pair of waders and we our first member goes
over. We see there is some infrared
projection on the ground where we are standing and the uv-light is brought
over….and then time is called. We didn’t
escape.
So after the time was called we got a chance to walk through
the puzzle. Onions, on the other team, relayed to me that in the puzzle room,
they had to solve a puzzle, which gave them a key to open the door onto the
hallway. I’m unclear about what exactly the glass window room was about but I
did see that in the surgery room, there was an operating table with a dead body
on it, a box on the ground with a gym locker type lock (those kind where you
have to turn right, then left and then right) and on the wall a pad with five
lighted buttons. The locked box had yet to be opened but four of the five
lights were green. Onions said that when they found the room only two of the
lights were green. Then the final escape door had a lock on it that we didn’t
have the key too.
In our post-game analysis, we finally figured out that the
random screw on the ground in our original jail cell actually unlocked the room
so it could slide on the rails. We also figured that the uv-code on our side of
the water room most probably would have opened the lock box in the surgery
room. We were ALL IMPRESSED at how cool
and well thought out this puzzle room was!
Apparently the Mr. X here in Beijing has four other ones currently set
up.
