Are you looking for something fun to do with friends? Are you tired of the same old and want to challenge yourself in new social ways? Have you ever considered doing an escape room? I can say from experience that nothing brings people together quite like being trapped in a puzzle. I know it sounds weird to people who haven’t tried it before, ‘Why would I pay money to try and leave a room?’, but somewhere in its themed experience and complex problems we get lost in the moment and can get to experience our friendships in a new way. It’s great cross-generationally as well which makes it a great activity to do with friends and family.
The first escape room was built in Japan in 2007 by a man named Takao Kyoto who wanted to marry problem-solving with storytelling. There were already a large number of computer games and the like which did this but he was the first person to make it an in-person experience. The industry really started to take off in 2014 when businesses started investing good money into developing the rooms and making the experiences more involving. They became popular among fans of in-person games as well as business teams who wanted to take part in bonding exercises. The global pandemic in 2020 hit the industry hard with many companies switching to doing online events but now in 2022 people have a renewed appetite for these kinds of social games.
The joy of escape rooms is found at the heart of its premise. Being in a puzzle. It’s having to use lots of different parts of your brain to solve many different kinds of puzzles with friends. You get to delegate tasks to each other’s skillsets and have fun working over complex scenarios in a fun story environment. The feeling of accomplishing an escape room in the right time with a group of friends is unmatched.
You generally have to follow a series of clues that are laid are uncovered with each puzzle that will lead you to the next. You feel like a treasure hunter as you each use your brains to work your way out and around puzzles.
The threat of time is always looming which creates a great sense of urgency in your activities. This means things can get fun and heated under pressure and causes you to commit more of yourself to the story you are experiencing. Towards the end of the rooms, the threat of not getting to experience the end of the story becomes real and the tension mounts in a fantastically enjoyable way.
In order to survive an escape room, the strategy really revolves around how you utilise all the members of your team. It’s great for trust-building and team management (hence why so many businesses use them for team-building exercises. You need to quickly first work out who is good at what. This is easy in a way as people will generally tell you what they enjoy doing.
Throughout the experience, you will start to understand that you can’t complete the puzzles by yourself. There are things that you don’t know how to do that others do. This goes a long way to bring people closer together as you understand that you can be more when you work with others than when you work alone. It’s this understanding that bonds people and can help solidify friendships.
Escape rooms are dynamic and interesting experiences that are great for people from all walks of life. They are experiences that bring people together and create lasting memories.
