Unpopular opinion: Escape Rooms Are a Scam as Big as a Door With No Handle
Gary Opinions argues that escape rooms are just expensive cupboards where clocks go to bully decent people.
I have had enough of escape rooms. They are a scam as big as a door with no handle, and I refuse to be lectured by people who enjoy finding keys in decorative soup bowls. For years, I have entered these alleged adventures expecting a puzzle. I leave with a receipt, a damp elbow and the firm sense that a wall has been laughing at me.
The fraud begins with the word “escape.” Escape from what? A locked room I paid to enter. Buying a sandwich and then complaining about the bread would make more sense, because at least the sandwich did not claim it would help you flee the bakery. A cupboard, meanwhile, knows its job. It stores things.
I once spent fourteen minutes looking for a clue inside a fake clock. The clue was another, smaller clock. Inside that clock sat a note telling me to trust my instincts. My instincts had already advised leaving, but they did not possess the required four-digit code, so management appears to have ruled them inadmissible.
“I call it freedom, and it has never once asked me to decode a ceiling fan.”
Then come the household objects, promoted to the status of ancient relics. A rubber duck is suddenly a cipher. A teacup carries a warning. In Lower Wombley, a shoelace tied in a knot triggered a blinking red bulb, which informed me that I had failed emotionally. The lampshade was watching.
By this point, the industry needs official language. Being shut in a pantry with twelve strangers is called an “immersive experience.” Shouting at a bookshelf becomes collaborative problem-solving. And the person whispering clues through a ceiling tile is the game master, though he remains, in practical terms, a man in a cupboard with unusually good lungs.
My position is modest. Puzzles are fine. Rooms are useful. Doors deserve support when they open after you turn the handle. I object to leisure requiring a countdown, a suspicious portrait and a host called Pexley Crumb appearing on a monitor to announce, “Your remaining time is now mostly theoretical.”
Until escape rooms reward customers for identifying the exit in the first minute, I will stay home. The locks there are honest, and the only unresolved mystery is why I keep putting my reading glasses in the refrigerator. Call me bitter. I call it freedom. It has never asked me to decode a ceiling fan.