Escape Room Canada

Cole Irwin
Rough Draft: Media, Creativity and Society
3 min readOct 24, 2017

Over the summer break, I have attended multiple escape rooms at a certain venue in North York to see whether we were brilliant at solving challenges. We were only able to complete a few.

Inside one of Escape Canada’s rooms

What are escape rooms?

A type of entertainment where challengers enter a themed area of their choosing. They must escape by completing multiple difficult puzzles within a certain time limit. These rooms contain props, devices, and visuals that enhance the feeling of physically being in a simulated scenario. Some involve scary themes that are not recommended for young participants or for those who don’t want to be frightened. The challengers have no influence over the plot of the story as it is a linear preset story line where progressing through each level leads towards completing the room.

Choosing your escape room experience

Base your selection on how difficult you want your experience to be. Consider the stats for each escape room, e.g. the success ratio, the “best time cleared” or the best score. Some escape rooms also offer bonus side missions for those who feel they can take on extra challenges. Also be mindful of the number of participants required or suggested as this may affect your ability to complete the challenges.

How it works

You are first briefed with basic rules and safety regulations. Pay attention, as this will help you distinguish between what is part of the game and what is used for staff and safety purposes. It can also provide certain tips for participants to be aware of throughout the event. You will then learn the story behind your mission, giving you a better understanding of the situation as well as a sense of purpose. Depending on the selected challenge, participants may start all together or divided into smaller group and placed in different room.

As competitors progress through each room, the level of difficulty increases. There are times where you are required to return to previous completed rooms to progress further as there could be hidden messages, clues and meaning in every small detail.

Working collaboratively

The purpose of this activity is to be able to work with multiple team members to quickly solve tricky puzzles. Personally, there were times where I would not have been able to come up with solutions on my own. However, it can also be difficult working with multiple people because of miscommunication. Confusion, lack of cooperation, or lack of information throughout the rooms can stop you from completing your mission.

End of the mission

If you complete the mission within the time allotted: Congratulations! Otherwise, you’ll be informed by one of the staffs that you have ran out of time. You can then asks for explanations on how to complete the rest of the room, or you can try again. There were times where we were so close to completing the room, however we got stuck right near the end as we were missing a small amount of required information from details or from not identifying objects properly. There were also moments where we ran out of time entirely due to confusion and having to run back and forth to memorize information located in multiple rooms.

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