With the ongoing pandemic and lockdowns still in effect, escape room locations are working on online games (which we’re calling online escape rooms), while other companies are capitalizing on creating escape room games (like board games and puzzle books).
THE PROJECT:
Jan Van Damme, from Crux Club HQ, creates outdoor puzzle hunts, which “are similar to an escape room, but take place outdoors. The goal is to accomplish something in the world, not get out of a room.”
Van Damme’s new venture, however, comes in the form of an escape room style puzzle book, which means that there is a story leading you through an interactive book of theme-related puzzles based on those you might typically see in an escape room.
Enter Mob Treasure, their new Kickstarter, which is live through Thursday, March 4. They’ve crushed their funding goal, so the funds for the project will be collected and awards delivered this May (per their projection).
Hello everyone! It’s been quite a while since we wrote a non-review-related post, but we have some news that may be useful to the escape room community! We’re here with Marcell from Escape Spy. We’d like to share with you what he’s been doing the past few months.
Marcell is an escape room enthusiast who got the idea for his site, https://www.escapespy.com, while trying to find rooms to escape with short notice. Finding it difficult to navigate the websites on his mobile (and not wanting to have 5 – 10 tabs open in his mobile browser), he created the first version of Escape Spy to crawl the major escape room companies in California. After showing it to friends, they approved and requested he expand outside of California, and then outside the U.S.
Marcell reached out to us for some insight on what else his site should offer as an escape-room-only search site. We provided him with our feedback on making the site more user-friendly and better organized.
Escape Spy started as a simple search for Marcell’s own booking needs. It has since morphed into a one-stop shop to help you find available escape rooms on specific days/times and in specific areas (based on city or zip code) as quickly and easily as possible. The site shows over 13,000 rooms across more than 3,000 locations, making it one of the largest, most comprehensive directories online (if not the THE largest). Dozens of scrapers power the searches for open rooms and locations, using thousands of hours of bot crawler-time a month (plus automated quality checks).
One additional feature Marcell added is an escape tracker. You establish a tracker account and add your escapes and the other members of your group. So, if you wanted to search for a room that you did with only your wife so you could recommend it to your friends, you could narrow the search on rooms you did with only your wife and then send those rooms to your friends. That’s a pretty great feature once you start getting into double- and triple-digit escape counts.
Check out the site here and let him know The Escape Room Guys sent you!
Owners, if you have a location and your information isn’t included on the site, or the information is incorrect, just email Marcell. He’s willing to work with owners to ensure that they’re included and the information on his site is accurate and useful.
We recently added a new feature to the site for Escape Room owners and managers. Now, by clicking here, you can send us a request to add a discount code to the site! (You can also find this on our header bar as a sub-menu to “Discount Codes.”) We are offering this as a service so you have an alternative from using Groupon.
All you have to do is fill out the form and one of us will contact you to ensure it’s a legitimate request from an employee or owner. If you know someone who owns a room or works at one, please share this post with them. The more discounts, the merrier!
We have a page of discount codes from companies that we’ve worked with or visited in the past, but have decided to offer this service to any legitimate escape room location so you can help spread the word about your rooms.
Your discount will be posted on our Discount Codes page, as well as be put into the rotator on the right navigation (in alpha order).
*Disclaimer: the Escape Room Guys offer these codes as an additional bonus to our readers, and we do not monetarily benefit when those codes are used.
We just found out that we were named to a list of the Top 48 Escape Room Bloggers to Follow in 2019, being ranked #11 by an escape room marketing and seo (search engine optimization) company called SEO ORB. The top 48 were chosen from over 300 escape room blogging websites.
Check out the write up on us!
Obviously, we’re honored to have made the list, which features a number of other great blogging sites. We worked hard on establishing our grading rubric to ensure that we covered all rooms we do consistently and fairly, and spend hours trying to write our reviews to provide an accurate representation of our experience, while not giving away spoilers to ruin the experience for others.
This blog started off as a hobby in February 2016… an experiment (if you will), to see if we could provide a service to the emerging escape room community and help grow the popularity of this type of event. It was also a way for us to refine our way of thinking of what escape rooms should contain to give that overall great experience., and we continue to refine as we go.
We ended 2018 with 4x the number of unique visitors and hits to the website than we had the previous year, so it’s encouraging and exciting to see how our little experiment is taking off, and we’re looking forward to what the future might bring. Thank you to all of our readers, whether you are new to the site, or are a frequent visitor.
So, for a little while now, we’ve seen rumors and then brief snapshots of an Escape Room movie. Being the enthusiasts that we are, as well as loving a good thriller, we were a bit intrigued as to how the crew was going to take an escape room experience and turn it into a cinematic experience.
The local DC rep from Columbia Pictures reached out to us to see if we’d be interested in attending the DC premier of the movie. Since we already promote reviews and games, and worked with the Solver team last year on their movie, we agreed spread the word.
This movie opens in theaters on January 4.
The premise: (from the press release)
You find yourself in a room – no windows, only one door, and it’s locked. The madman who’s locked you in has set up a series of fiendishly clever and difficult puzzles that, when solved in the correct order, will lead to the key and your salvation. And to add to the difficulty, he’s set a ticking clock, with one hour to complete the puzzles and escape… or face the consequences.
What sounds like a horror movie is one of the fastest-growing entertainments in the world: the escape room phenomenon. Armed with only your wits – and the variety of strengths of the people in the room with you – players have been cracking codes, deciphering enigmas, and unlocking hidden caches as quickly as they can. Each room has a secret plot, with players piecing it together as a fun, team-building experience. Since the dawn of the concept in 2010, escape rooms have popped up all over the world at an amazing rate by satisfying human nature’s hunger for fun and escape from reality.
When producer Ori Marmur tried out an escape room with his family, he saw the potential for a film – and because audiences worldwide have embraced the concept, it could be a film whose themes had global appeal. “I thought it was very immersive and incredibly fun, sort of a living boardgame,” he says. The project seemed to be a natural fit with a classic locked-room mystery setup, and with producer Neal H. Moritz, he began to shepherd the project. Quickly, they hit on a way to raise the stakes, making the ultimate escape room: one that is not only hyper slick and incredibly dangerous – when the clock runs out, it means death.
Our Take:
We’ve done a number of rooms where a serial killer or madman has us trapped in their lab or lair, and we have to figure our way out before he/she returns. Now, we’ve even done a few rooms that had a “Saw” feeling with them, so the overall theme of the movie isn’t that far a stretch. What is interesting is that the room turns deadly AFTER the characters begin playing. From the looks of the trailer and the press packet we received, it simply looks like the six strangers have agreed to do a room together that is billed as the most immersive room yet, and has a $1 million prize for escaping. Let’s just hope none of them show up drunk or stoned (this has happened to us).
As the experience progresses, they have to make their way through and figure out their own role in the game and how the rooms were specifically created for each of them… and not die in the process.
We were pretty psyched to see that Adam Robitel, who directed Insidious: The Last Key also directed this one, so that brings some legitimacy to the movie being a true thriller.
Stay tuned for our review of the movie. Check out and follow our social media channels below to be notified when new postings and interviews are published.
Check out the trailer below (from Columbia/Sony Pictures YouTube channel):
Planning on seeing this movie? What are you most excited about?
Comment on the post below and let us know!
Logistics:
Rated PG-13 for Terror/Perilous Action & Violence, Some Suggestive Material and Language.
Columbia Pictures presents an Original Film production, Escape Room. Starring Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Jay Ellis, Tyler Labine, Nik Dodani, with Yorick van Wageningen. Directed by Adam Robitel. Produced by Neal H. Moritz and Ori Marmur. Screenplay by Bragi Schut and Maria Melnik. Story by Bragi Schut. Executive Producer is Rebecca Rivo. Director of Photography is Marc Spicer. Production Designer is Edward Thomas. Editor is Steven Mirkovich, ACE. Music by Brian Tyler & John Carey.
We checked out the LAST Episode (#12) of Solver’s Puzzle Hunt released on January 24. This one is all about Luke (the main character) trying to find an investment to save his fund. The puzzle takes you back to the beginning, and makes you think about the entire journey, which was a nice way to end the hunt (and a celebratory glass of scotch never hurts.
Time is limited, so use everything you learned and start at the beginning (really… start at the beginning).
We checked out Episode #11 of Solver’s Puzzle Hunt released on January 19. This one is all about a (fictional) Twitter battle between Elon Musk and tech billionaire rival, Demien LaBlanc.
Make sure you follow the Twitter exchange very closely, and look at the URLs.
We checked out Episode #10 of Solver’s Puzzle Hunt released on January 14. This one is perfect for people who can pay close attention to detail, and possibly view things from different perspectives.
Subscribe to this blog or our YouTube channel to stay informed as to when the new challenges are released!
We checked out Episode #9 of Solver’s Puzzle Hunt released on January 10. This one is perfect for people who love crossword puzzles, numbers, and logic puzzles. It wasn’t overly difficult, but it did require some focus and some educated guesses.
Subscribe to this blog or our YouTube channel to stay informed as to when the new challenges are released!
We checked out Episode #8 of Solver’s Puzzle Hunt released on January 7. This one was pretty interesting and is geared more towards those who can really follow directions (and maybe had an artistic side in elementary school).
Subscribe to this blog or our YouTube channel to stay informed as to when the new challenges are released!
