NFPA Journal - July/August 2019 - 54

Our wacky professor had done it again-

That was the setup for a recent escape room outing I
organized with my girlfriend, along with her sister and
brother-in-law.
Around the world, escape rooms are a booming form
of entertainment that involve confining paying customers inside a space, the goal being to escape the room or to
keep moving into other rooms by solving puzzles or other
brain-busting challenges, typically in 60 minutes or less.
The attractions come in an array of themes, from medieval
mysteries to futuristic adventures, and as the industry's
popularity has expanded, many of the rooms have similarly
grown in sophistication and complexity. On a drizzly Friday
afternoon in May, we made our way to downtown Boston to
see for ourselves what all the buzz was about.
Our destination was Escape the Room Boston, which operates three distinctly themed escape rooms-The Apartment,
The Dig, and our game, The Clock Tower-on the third floor
of a nondescript concrete building in the heart of Boston's
theater district. Entering the building was a bit of a puzzle
in itself; to get the front door to unlock, we had to call up
to the escape room from a phone hanging on the building's exterior. Once inside, we made our way to an elevator,
which opened directly to the lobby of the business, whose
space was clearly repurposed and much smaller than I had
imagined. I could feel my expectations sink a bit as I looked
around the cramped quarters.
But 10 minutes later, after we'd each paid our $30
admission and entered The Clock Tower room, my expectations were again on the rise. The room-which we would
later learn was one in a series of three separate rooms

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constituting The Clock Tower-was intricately designed in
the manner of a steampunk laboratory that looked like the
haunt of a mad scientist, plastered with a jumble of clocks
and lab equipment. Seconds after we entered the first room,
a prominent neon-red timer began ticking down from 60
minutes. The game was on.
We moved as swiftly as we could around the space, rifling
through drawers and cabinets, flicking switches, and punching buttons in the hope of revealing clues or objects that
would get us closer to freeing our time-hopping friend. We
made it deep into the game, solving enough puzzles to progress into the third and final room. But with just a minute left
and important clues still unsolved, I knew it was over. As the
timer struck zero, speakers mounted on the ceiling bellowed
a resounding womp womp, the universal sound of failure.
The game had ended, and our professor remained stuck in
some dank fold of time. We hadn't even managed to get ourselves out of the clock tower.
Even so, the experience was worth the price of admission.
It was my first time in an escape room, but it likely won't be
my last-the experience was genuinely fun, like being part of a
movie or television show as opposed to idly watching it go by
on a screen. I was impressed with the quality of set materials
and the special effects. The puzzles were tricky yet solvable,
and it was a good way to bond with friends and family.
But for anyone familiar with escape rooms, it's not hard to
see that the outcome can be very different if the concept is
taken too literally.
In January, in the small city of Koszalin in northern Poland,
a group of five teenage girls was participating in an escape

TOP, GETT Y IMAGES; TOP, OPPOSITE , GETT Y IMAGES

he'd gotten himself trapped in some dark corner of the
space-time continuum, and we had 60 minutes to repair
his time machine, tucked inside an old clock tower,
and rescue him. If we failed, he'd be stuck there forever.

NFPA Journal - July/August 2019

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