Seacoast gets in on the escape-room trend
An international antiques dealer has been kidnapped! The kidnappers are looking for a rare, valuable necklace the dealer has hidden somewhere in his study. You’ve only got an hour to get the necklace before the kidnappers send the dealer to the Great Estate Sale in the Sky.
That’s the premise behind “Westower’s Study,” the first challenge in the Portsmouth Escape Room, which opened on April 23. Escape rooms are interactive, live-action, adventure games. Players are “locked” in a room and must find clues and solve puzzles before they can get out and win the game. Since escape rooms began opening in Europe and Asia earlier this decade, they’ve become a global phenomenon. Portsmouth is the latest city to let amateur sleuths and adventurers test their mental mettle.
“You don’t need to have any outside knowledge, you don’t need to use your cell phone or anything like that, everything you need to solve the game is within the room,” says Javi Kalback, co-owner of the Portsmouth Escape Room. People use deductive reasoning, logic, and communication skills, and sometimes must think outside the box to escape.
A scene from the Portsmouth Escape Room.
The adventures are themed, such as a jailbreak or a murder mystery. If players are stuck for clues, they’re able to contact a “game master” who can help them.
“There are clues, but they’re not 100-percent obvious or evident, so people have to think about how to read it or how to solve it,” says Kalback.
Besides being a fun adventure and a way to escape life’s stress for a while, escape rooms are also used for corporate events as a team-building activity. Kalback admires that aspect of escape rooms, and it was one reason why she and her husband Seth decided on this venture.
“Everybody has different skills, so you need to figure out how people read the puzzles or think about solutions in different ways, and I kind of enjoy seeing that process. I’m very competitive, so I really enjoy racing against time. There’s a bit of a theatrical component to it, the way that they dress the room to fit a specific scene. Like it could be a jail or it could be a gallery, it could really be anything,” says Kalback.
Scott Nicholson, a professor of game design at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario, says escape rooms are just starting to gain traction in the United States. They originated in Asia and expanded to Europe around 2010. Nicholson says the first escape room in North America appeared in Toronto in 2013.
According to escapereviewer.com, a website that tracks and reviews escape rooms, there are about 3,500 escape rooms around the world and 548 in the U.S. The Portsmouth Escape Room is the third in the state.
Nicholson says escape rooms often take cues from adventure/reality TV shows and movies.
“They’ve been inspired by reality-TV shows like ‘Survivor,’ as well as movies like ‘Indiana Jones’ or ‘Saw,’ and it gives us a chance to actually step into one of those worlds to see, if we were the main character in that movie or in that reality show, could we solve the challenges in the time needed? That’s a very appealing thing,” says Nicholson.
A scene from the Portsmouth Escape Room.
How do you know which escape-room theme is right for you? According to Nicholson, it all comes down to your interests and goals.
“For me, I’m looking for an activity, a room feel that’s going to match who I’m with. If I’m with people that don’t like horror, I try to not go into horror rooms, because otherwise it’s going to be a bad experience, even if it’s a well-designed room. And if I’m looking to be with people with whom I just want to be social, then I don’t want a room that’s going to require a lot of thinking and really intense puzzling,” says Nicholson.
Escape rooms can be themed toward almost anything. “Alice in Wonderland,” “The X-Files,” outdoor survival, the Roaring ’20s, superheroes — if you like it, there’s an escape room for you.
But even if you attend a horror-themed escape room because you like that genre, you could still have a frightening experience.
“Poorly designed escape rooms are ones that contain a lot of red herrings and false clues, that have challenges and puzzles that aren’t logical and don’t fit within the theme that is presented, or that are unsafe, that have the players climbing or fumbling around in the dark in unsafe conditions,” says Nicholson.
While some escape rooms actually lock in players, Kalback says that’s not the case in Portsmouth.
“People are never actually locked in for real. They will come through one door, which will remain always open in case of emergency. There is another door that the group will exit through once they ‘win’ by solving all the puzzles,” she says.
A scene from the Portsmouth Escape Room.
Ultimately, escape rooms are a game, and games are meant to be fun. The Kalbacks have kept that in mind while creating Portsmouth Escape Room.
“It’s not going to be impossible — you want people to have fun. I want it to be difficult enough so that people have to think about it, but at the same time, there will be cameras in the room and there’s going to be a screen, so you can request clues,” Kalback says.
Matt Hutchins of Portsmouth, who won tickets to the Portsmouth Escape Room, says this will be his first escape-room experience.
“I had heard about escape rooms before and thought they sounded cool. The only way I had heard about them before was from an episode of the ‘Big Bang Theory.’ My fiancé and I thought it seemed fun,” he said.
The seven friends joining Hutchins on the adventure haven’t been to an escape room either.
“We’re all just looking forward to the adventure of trying something new. We all like puzzle-solving and bonding over quality time,” Hutchins says.
The Portsmouth Escape Room is located at 30 Mirona Road E