On March 13, my friends and I went downtown to check out one the newer escape places: the Austin Escape Game. Located on Red River Street with a bright red sign sticking from the side of the building, it looked, just by the appearance, like a very unique experience. After spending an intense hour in a locked room, I learned that it was indeed quite as it appeared to be.

The Austin Escape Game is quite similar to the well-known Panic Room. They both involve rooms that are locked, and require you and your teammates to solve puzzles in order to escape. Though I am not too familiar with the Panic Room, I understand that the Austin Escape Game provides four diverse, high-quality games to choose from: The Heist, Gold Rush, Prison Break, and Classified. As beginners, we chose the easier game, The Heist. The plot was based upon a stolen art piece that needed to be recovered before the hour ran out, and as simple as the mission sounded, it was definitely not as easy as we had expected.

There were two rooms that we needed to pass through in order to succeed our mission. The first room, because none of us had any idea on how things ran, required a lot of guidance from our ever-so-helpful guide. She  gave us as many hints as we needed, and by the time we managed to escape into the second room, we were way past the recommended fifteen minute mark.

If we thought that the first room was a challenge, the second room probably caused most of us to rethink our intelligence. It was, without a doubt, difficult. I won’t spoil the fun by giving out details, but I will say that there were many moments where I just stopped trying and just wandered about while my teammates desperately searched for clues.

In the end, we didn’t finish the room. It was a great disappointment, mainly due to the ambiguity of an instruction, but we all had great time. The quality of the rooms were astounding (I felt as if we had entered a museum), and the guides were definitely our life-jackets throughout the entire hour. I would highly recommend that you bring at least seven mates to join you, because there are a bucketload of tasks that need to be done within such a short period of time. Go check it out and see if you have what it takes to escape!