Sherwin 1

Alyssa Sherwin

Professor Green

ENG111

03.10.2021

Escape.

60 minutes, 1 room, hundreds of clues. Could you escape? Breakout (escape) rooms

“lock” you in a room and you have 60 minutes to solve, sometimes, hundreds of different

clues to find the key or code to open/unlock the door. I have done multiple escape rooms

within the last four years that are all different and have unique levels of difficulty. Some

people find escape rooms very boring and/or too difficult for them to complete. They are also

still growing currently and are not very well known right now.

My favorite one that I have done so far was called “The Kidnapping” at a local escape

room company in Virginia Beach. This room begins with all of the participants (captives)

“waking up” handcuffed and blindfolded in a strange room. All of the participants must

collectively work together to find the hidden clues, solve the puzzles, and escape the room.

Now to the storyline of my adventure in “The Kidnapping.”

We start off with the gamemaster, the person behind the scenes, explaining to us

the basic rules. “Don’t tear anything off the walls, don’t break anything, and try to return

things where they belong.” As a group, we listened to all of the different rules and watched
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the starting video that gave us a background with the setting of this escape room. After

everything was set up, the gamemaster put blindfolds on us and led us into the room in a

chain effect, one person after another. After we were all in the room, we then all had

handcuffs placed on our wrists and we were handcuffed to something. Of course, because

we all had blindfolds on, no one knew where we were or what was going on. After the

gamemaster got everything situated, he told us we could take off our blindfolds and he left

the room.

It wasn’t until after we took off the blindfold that we realized the handcuffs were

just magnetically attached to a cot in the middle of this small, dimly-lit room that was

designed to look like an old basement. As I looked around, I saw 4 brick painted walls

surrounding us and a table over in the corner. I couldn’t see much of anything because there

was such little illumination coming from the small floor lamp by the door. We asked if we

were allowed to turn on the overhead lights. The gamemaster said we could if we deemed

that it would help us throughout the time we had. We all hobbled over near the door,

dragging the cot with us, and flipped the light switch. Once the lights turned on, I spotted a

key hanging on the opposite wall. We then shuffled over that way, dragging the cot with us

again to get the key. We discovered it was the key to unlock our handcuffs, so we were able

to move around freely, on our own, not all attached to a single cot. We looked around the

room and first spotted out all of the different locks so we had an idea of what we were
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looking for, such as keys, combinations, directions, etc. Once we found a couple of different

locks, we started looking around for clues that would help us unlock some of the locks. We

found many different clues, some of which got mixed up. We found 4 jars of fake fingers

that were painted different colors.

Well, two of the people that I was doing the breakout room with emptied out the

jars, but we were not supposed to. Because of this, the clues were mixed up and we no

longer had the right clues. We spent a while trying to figure out how they originally were

and what the clue was. Once we got everything set. At one point, we solved a clue and props

dropped from a box in the ceiling. I was with two other guys and one other girl and the guys

screamed louder than us girls did. We all started laughing so much that we weren’t even

focused on the task that we had at hand. We were getting to the end of the breakout room

and we knew this because we had everything unlocked, we were just trying to unlock the

code. We found a piece of paper with dots and lines and different letters. I soon realized that

this was morse code and that we needed some way to figure it out. It was then that we

found a small black box with what looked like a speaker on it. Once it started playing, I

realized that it was the beeps of morse code. The guys used the beeps and the keys to tell

me what it was and I wrote it on the whiteboard on the door. Once we figured out what it

said, I counted the letters in each word and then figured out the code to unlock the door. The
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rim of the door lit up bright white and then the door opened and the game master walked

in. He told us that we finished with 10 minutes and 27 seconds left.

Overall, we all had a fun time. There were jokes, laughs, and screams, but in the end it

was all worth it. No lesson was learned in the process of breaking out of this room, but it

definitely was a fun experience and it was great to just have fun and hang out with friends

for an hour. It was a great experience and I would recommend it to anyone that is interested

in fun for a little bit.