The cluemaster Victor finishes his countdown to 0. Our hour is up. My group, eight of us in total, did not solve all the puzzles. We remain locked in the room. Victor takes off his ringmaster hat. He says we were so close. And then he figuratively peels back the curtain and explains what we missed. We will not die in this room, it turns out; here the cluemaster shows us his grand design and how to defeat it.
This is the experience of Escape the Room NYC an interactive play space created by Victor Blake. A group of up to 10 people are locked up for one hour, trapped in a one-room office in midtown Manhattan. The room is littered with things to solve; some are obvious puzzles and others are subtle clues waiting to be deciphered. If you figure them out, you will be able to get the final key and unlock the room.
The interactive event is styled after the videogame subgenre Room Escape, a type of point-and-click puzzle game where the protagonist finds themselves in a closed room—by kidnapping, cosmic intervention, or whatever—and has to decipher clues, use objects, and solve puzzles to eventually get out. There are many browser-based Flash games of the genre. The most well known example is for iPad though, simply titled The Room, made by Fireproof Games, which is currently free to own and has a recently released sequel for $4.99.
Read the full article at Kill Screen.