Room-escape venues ‘like you are in a movie’

Puzzles and clues to breaking the room at Captain C Room Escape. — Echo Qu

Enter this room hidden in a residential area of Xuhui District: Every bamboo blind is drawn down to keep out the sunshine; a side table stands in front of the windows; on the table sit rolled bamboo strips, thread-bound Chinese books and Chinese brushes; a calligraphy of a Chinese constellation hangs on the wall. Paper lanterns, swords and wooden chests with bronze locks all add to the mystery of the room.

Then a young woman enters. She takes a bow with hands folded in front and says in an energetic and slightly rich voice: "Greetings! I'm the senior of Lingshan Denomination. You are welcome to be an apprentice here as an illusionist."

She demonstrates some spells and one curse tablet. Participants can be apprentices only by finding the curse tablet in the room within an hour. The woman leaves and the door is locked.

Real-life room-escape game has become the latest craze for young people in Shanghai in recent years. It doesn't involve a controller or fancy mobile device. It just takes a bit of thinking to get outside the box.

The idea is quite straightforward: With minimal explanation, players (usually four to six) find themselves locked in an unfamiliar environment, which seems to have no way out. Using items they find such as ciphers, keys and figures on the wall, players face the daunting task of escaping. During the process, they usually have to solve many puzzles including some involving mathematics, physics, culture, art, even music theory and more.

The rooms have varying themes — some spooky but hardly scary while some put the participants in a woven fantasy. Players can choose the game's degree of difficulty.

As Halloween is tomorrow, in addition to planning fancy costumes and dresses in advance, a festive alternative is to become locked in a spooky or eccentric room for an hour with several friends to take an adventurous journey.

The going rate generally ranges from 70 yuan (US$11.47) to 100 yuan per hour per player.

"It's like you are in a movie," 20-year-old college student Sam Li tells Shanghai Daily. "By playing this game you get to be a friend of Harry Porter, a part of the characters of a beloved comic book. With elaborated scene décor and puzzles one after another, I feel remarkably exhilarated."

The escape-the-room premise has been popular with computer and video players for years. The first basic game-play mechanism of having the player trapped in a single location dates to 1988, in which the player was trapped inside a toilet.

In 2006, a group of system programmers in California's Silicon Valley decided to take the game off-screen. They created a real-life place named "Original Piece," which was inspired by the works of English crime novelist Agatha Christie. Only 23 people have escaped from that room successfully.

Later the phenomenon found popularity in the US, Japan, Malaysia and China.

"Shanghai has many real-life escape-the-room venues with different characteristics — from big-scale to small ones, motion-featured to logic deduction-featured, scary themes to cute themes — for the players to choose," says Leo Yang, owner and designer of Chuansongmen Escape Room.