When my 19-year-old son, Quinn, was young, one of our favorite pastimes was playing the Professor Layton game series on his Nintendo DS. The overarching story was one large mystery, and as we played, we gathered clues to help us solve it. I had wanted to experience an escape room for some time, and I figured Quinn would be the perfect partner in crime.
I discovered Escapology online, and it earned very good reviews. It’s located near Armature Works, which isn’t a far drive from Westchase.
Escapology offers seven rooms, four of which have an optional “kids mode.” Fans of Indiana Jones may enjoy “Lost City,” where players seek a great explorer’s lost journal while trying to calm angry spirits. If pop culture is your thing, you could play “Scooby-Doo and the Spooky Castle Adventure.” (I suspect the latter option involves an unmasking of some sort, but I can’t be certain!)
When I made our reservations, I was going to choose “TH3 C0D3,” so we could pretend to be FBI agents fighting cybercrime. Quinn is a computer science major at UCF, and I thought he might find it engaging. As I began the booking process, however, I noticed that it was ranked “medium difficulty.” I was feeling ambitious, so I wanted to select a room that was “advanced difficulty.” As a fan of the visual arts, I was drawn to “Who Stole Mona?”
I booked our reservations for a weekday afternoon. We paid to park on a metered side street. I wished I had asked about parking ahead of time because we learned that they validate parking in the garage in their building.
We were greeted by a Game Master who confirmed our reservation and explained the rules. She asked whether we wanted to purchase any drinks or snacks from their bar, but we declined.
Our Game Master then led us to our room and prepared us for what was to come. Cell phones may not be used in the escape room, and they provide a safe in your room where you can store them. There is a monitor in the corner of the room that played a short introductory video about our adventure.
According to the video, the Mona Lisa has gone missing, and a dangerous Russian billionaire named Vladimir Stepanov is the suspect. Quinn and I were playing the part of underworld art dealers trying to recover the famous painting to reap the $50 million reward. We had only an hour to find it before Stepanov’s guards would inevitably find us.
Our Game Master assured us that she would be watching our progress throughout the game, and asked whether we wanted her to provide us with hints when she thought we were struggling or only when we requested them. We chose the latter.
She then closed the door, and another video announced that our adventure had begun. (For the record, the doors to the escape room are not locked and you can step out whenever you want.) I looked around for some idea of how to begin, and was completely flummoxed. I incorrectly assumed that the Game Master would tell us where to start, but we received no such instruction. Quinn also seemed initially uncertain, so we looked around for a few moments and started with wooden mazes on the wall in the hopes that solving them would lead us in some direction.
Completing the mazes unlocked some tools that were meant to assist us with the next part of the puzzle. I was unable to make that leap, but Quinn correctly guessed what to do next. I don’t want to go into too much detail in case you, too, want to find the Mona Lisa!
Overall, solving the puzzles was much less intuitive than I thought it would be. I was under the impression that one step would very clearly lead to the next, and that was not the case. I was wholly unprepared for the great leaps in logic that we had to take, but our skill sets complemented each other nicely.
We struggled at times and requested multiple hints from our Game Master. At one point the Game Master entered the room to tell us that we had unlocked a cabinet because we were completely unaware that we had done so. In the end, we found the Mona Lisa but did not escape from Stepanov’s henchmen in time. Close, but no cigar!
The timer on the monitor counted down the entire 60 minutes, and when our time was up, our Game Master debriefed us. She then led us back to the lobby where she offered to take our photo with the props of our choosing. Quinn humored me by allowing her to take a pic of us with a sign that read, “Almost Doesn’t Count.” Maybe we should have opted for Scooby-Doo…
KNOW BEFORE YOU GO:
- The escape rooms cost $49.99 per person.
- Each room accommodates two to eight players, and your experience will always be private. You’ll never have to play with strangers.
The first Escapology opened in Orlando in 2014. There are now more than fifty locations across the country and around the world