Resident Evil Escape Room: LA, UK – now 2017 Nationwide USA Tour

The Resident Evil franchise is continuing their 20th anniversary celebrations this year, after its escape room had a successful run in Los Angeles, followed by another stint in London two weeks ago. More exciting news has emerged, with the Resident Evil 7: Escape Experience going on a tour of six US cities in the coming weeks.

– San Francisco, Los Angeles: February 8th – March 5th 2017
– Portland, Oregon: February 8th – March 5th 2017
– Boston, Massachusetts: February 22nd – March 19th 2017
– New York, New York City: February 22nd – March 19th 2017
– Austin, Texas: March 8th – April 2nd 2017
– Chicago, Illinois: March 8th – April 2nd 2017

Tickets are $35 USD per person, except for San Francisco and New York where tickets are $40 USD per person instead.

https://www.eventbrite.com/o/capcom-iam8bit-11982654513

The Immersive London blog has a write up of their recent experience of the Resident Evil escape room when it visited London’s East End. Plenty of spoilers ahead – read it on their blog here.

 

// Other Escape Room News
Jerudong Park Diamond Heist Mystery – Brunei
“The largest escape room event in Brunei” took place from December 16^th – 24^th 2016. More than 800 people took part in an investigation to discover the thief who stole a diamond from Jerudong Park. Escape room company, Escape Square Gadong collaborated with other businesses for the event.

 

Escape Rooms used for leadership and recruitment at Wayfair, an online home interior business
The company have created their own version called Escape the Room and use it to train staff –
“Wayfair originally used it as a team building and problem solving activity on leadership ‘away days’. However, given how much fun it was and the changing nature of the skills and the people they are looking for they decided to introduce it as part of their customer service recruitment process.”
– CustomerThink

– Essa 🙂

 

 

Rules of the Game, the third and final book of the End Game franchise

It seems like the creators of End Game have changed the rules around for the third book.

For a quick catch up, the End Game novels follows twelve players descended from ancient blood lines who need to find three special keys to save the world. Inside the novels, there’s puzzles which
lead to an online treasure hunt.

Interested in what happened before? Here’s our summary of Book 1: The Calling and also the
Book 2: Sky Key puzzle hunt.

In book two, Sky Key – players needed to discover the starting point of the game. A few pages in, an image of a notepad with a scrambled website address had to be decoded.

No hints were given to decode the image either – creating a stumbling block for all players.

Now with the release of the new End Game novel, Rules of the Game – the first image inside shows clearly where to start:

https://starchamber.keplerfuturistics.com

From there, turn the wheel to register and start work on the first puzzle – which appears to accept a code word or phrase.

Here’s what else you might want to know:

When did it start?
January 9^th 2017

What are the prizes?
The Grand Prize is $250, 000 USD in cash to be given to the first person to solve all the puzzles in the third novel, Rules of the Game.

In addition, the first twelve people to solve all puzzles will get an End Game book set – featuring all the books and novellas signed by the author.

When does the competition end?
Whichever comes first: July 10^th, 2017 or when all puzzles have been solved and a winner of the Grand Prize is declared.

Did anyone win the $100,000 USD Sky Key prize (from Book 2)?
No – if the prize from book two, Sky Key was won by a player there would be press and media about it.

Help! Are there any hints?
Keep an eye on this page, to see if a Hints section is made available after a while. When checking the same section of the website for Sky Key, there’s a Hint section available – indicating which puzzles are relevant to each online stage of the puzzle hunt.

– Essa 🙂

 

 

Captain America’s Escape Room Prank in a Boston Comic Book Store

“Escape Rooms are these immersive games where you and your buddies have to solve puzzles and complete a mission before time runs out.”

With the help of Trapology in Boston, Chris Evans aka. Captain America and Omaze recently took over a comic book store and turned it into a Captain America escape room!

Also the Omaze competition where you could win the chance to play an escape room with Chris Evans closes February 2nd! The winner and three friends will get flown out to Boston, USA as well.

Enter here: omaze.com/Chris

+ Keep an eye out for a special link in the above Youtube video which will give you more entries for the Omaze competition!

– Essa 🙂

 

Celebrating Final Fantasy XIV’s 30th Anniversary – Escape Game in Japan

A diverse group of heroes trying to defeat evil is at the heart of each Final Fantasy video game.

The video game series is celebrating it’s 30^th anniversary this year and brand manager, Shinji Hashimoto revealed there will be a Final Fantasy XIV (14) escape game.

“Escape from the Great Labyrinth of Bahamut” will be available to the public from February 10^th 2017 and is another SCRAP partnership. Furthermore the escape game will visit five cities in Japan: Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo and Fukuoka and will have a time limit of 60 minutes.

The story follows the Great Sorcerer Ruizova and the Light Warriors who defeated the evil Bahamut and saved the land, Eorsea from destruction five years ago. Now Bahamut is returning from the underground and there’s 60 minutes before the resurgence is complete – will you be able to stop Bahamut with your friends?

Furthermore, the escape game is suitable for newcomers and long time fans of the Final Fantasy series. SCRAP have also hinted they want to bring the Final Fantasy escape game to the United States.

 

Ticket Prices
General Advanced Tickets: 3,600 yen
Group Advanced Tickets: 21,000 yen
On the Day Ticket: 4,100 yen

Escape from the Great Labyrinth of Bahamut
FF XIV Escape Room – Event information and tickets
http://realdgame.jp/zepp5_ffxiv/

Official Final Fantasy 30^th Anniversary Website
http://www.finalfantasy.jp/30th/

 

(L to R: Yoshida, FF XIV Producer and Kato, founder of SCRAP. Credit to FF XIV Website)

+ Bonus – SCRAP x Final Fantasy Interview
On the event website there’s an interview between SCRAP founder, Takao Kato and Naoki Yoshida, the producer of Final Fantasy XIV – who both tested the Final Fantasy XIV escape room.

The best parts of the interview are below –

Do you have any difficult problems when you make games where there are groups of people?
Kato: In the early days, there were not many formal rules when creating a real escape game. In the past, a team was exploring a venue and pulled out an unknown iron plate from the back of the venue and said, “This is sure to be part of the mystery!”. Even later when [we] asked the venue’s manager, they said “I do not remember placing such a plate”. (Laughs).

It’s not easy to always control what happens at the venue, so gradually the rules have changed so the [escape game] mystery can be solved without touching anything inside the venue. Then demand comes [from customers] I want to interact with more things in the game.

Yoshida: I sometimes think the idea is not to know the ceiling [any idea is possible in a game].

 

Q. How would you like players to enjoy the Final Fantasy XIV Escape Room?
Kato: I hope that you can project your expectations on to game characters and play with them. So, I would like you to experience something like being a character entering the world of Final Fantasy.

Because small potatoes are hidden in many places, if you look for them too much you can’t solve a mystery. [Laughs]. A/N: small potatoes = red herrings

The full interview can be found here in Japanese.

 

– Essa 🙂
(~ Late blog post as visiting extended family at the moment ~ )

Plus thanks to Room Escape Artist for letting us know about this escape game in the first place!

 

Fan2Sea Comic Con Cruise and Red Bull Escape Room World Championship Update

– Fan2Sea Comic Con Cruise
Imagine an escape room taking over an entire cruise ship.

The upcoming Fan2Sea Comic Con Cruise will have an escape room that is playable across the entire cruise ship. It’s onboard another Royal Caribbean cruise ship, this time – Brilliance of the Seas, with the cruise departing from Tampa, Florida in late January.

“Fan2Sea Comic Con Cruise attendees will experience one of The Great Escape Room’s On The Run events, involving multiple puzzle-solving skills that will tax even the most experienced gamer. Clues and puzzles will be hidden all over the ship, and can be solved in any order. … By incorporating the game into the entire ship, we’ll be taking the escape room to another level” – Fan2Sea.

 

– Red Bull Escape Room World Championships
The final round of the Red Bull competition has been moved back to March 25th – originally the event was going to be held in late February 2017. Check out the finals on Red Bull TV, just remember to download the relevant app!

Apple iOS – Red Bull TV
Android – Red Bull TV

Which team will win the championship!?!

-Essa 🙂

 

US President Obama and family play escape room on Hawaii holiday

Even the US president has played an escape room!

On Christmas Eve, Obama with his family and close friends decided to play a escape room while on holidays. The first family are enjoying their Christmas break in sunny Honolulu, Hawaii and decided to book in some time at Breakout Waikiki.

Buzzfeed mentions the group played Mission Manoa, at Breakout Waikiki’s facility – where participants take on the role of secret agents and deal with actors in the escape room who are acting as terrorists.

The room is described by employees as having a high level of difficulty and was the same room that players of the US Women’s National Soccer team played earlier this year (and they escaped with one minute left).

Meanwhile the most valued player of Obama’s team was Malia Obama who helped the team progress through the room and contributed to the team’s win – getting out of the escape room with 12 seconds left on the clock.

 

// Other Escape Room News
– Escape the Rubicon, is now appearing on a third Royal Caribbean Cruise ship called Harmony of the Seas. The escape room has multiple puzzles to solve at one time and the recommended group size to play is six people. If there are only five people, the gamemaster will kindly step in to play.

Read up on Escape the Rubicon here or keep an eye out for the same escape room onboard Anthem of the Seas (first cruise ship) and Ovation of the Seas (second cruise ship).

– Essa 🙂

 

What to watch – The Code: Secret Room, Escape! and Escape the Expected

Catchup – The Code: Secret Room (코드 – 비밀의 방)
– view online

Premiering in January 2016, The Code: Secret Room was inspired by the escape room trend in South Korea.

Ten contestants start in the basement on Level 8 and need to solve puzzles hidden around the floor. The puzzles reveal clues called “Main Codes”, which help contestants determine what the pass code for the door is.

The contestant enters the passcode to escape the floor and then takes the elevator to progress to the next round – where another floor awaits (Level 7 and so on). During each episode, a contestant gets eliminated and the winner of the series is the first person to escape from Level 1.

“This isn’t a program where we are given a problem and we have to solve it,” announcer Choi Song-hyun said, introducing the program and its appeal. “It all starts with finding the problem to solve (to escape the room) in the first place. – KoreaHerald

 

Watch Now – Escape!
– via Geek and Sundry (online)

Geek and Sundry are producing an escape room show called Escape!. Each week, a different team of celebrities try out a new escape room. Available on Geek and Sundry’s streaming service called Alpha, which costs $5 USD each month and streams weekly on Wednesday night at 8.30pm PST.

 

Coming Soon – Escape the Expected
– via HBO (USA channel)

HBO film crews were spotted in November filming Escape the Expected on University of Connecticut’s campus. Students in teams of five, signed up to play three escape rooms based on HBO’s most popular tv shows – Veep, Silicon Valley and Game of Thrones.

For the first two rooms, teams were given six minutes to find the code to open the door. The goal of the third and final room was to solve a 3D puzzle inspired by Games of Thrones and eventually sit on the Iron Throne.

Air date – TBA

– Essa 🙂

 

South Korea: Room Escape Cafes or Escape Rooms?

What’s the escape room industry like in South Korea?

In South Korea, the prevalent term used is “room escape cafe” or “room escape” to describe their business. While the word “escape room” is still in usage, it’s used less often and the results can be seen at the bottom of this blog post.

room escape cafe – 방 탈출 카페 (bang talchul kape)

escape room – 이스케이프 룸 (iseukeipeu lum)

 

The first escape room launched in Seoul, South Korea in May 2015 and there are currently over 50 escape room businesses in the country as of March 2016. It’s become a popular hobby for people and there are escape room enthusiast groups too – “the “RS mystery club” also serves as an important consultant or quiz-makers for many room escape cafes. They meet regularly, develop quizzes based on information they shared, and provide useful tips in creating new themes – Source.

In South Korea, escape rooms are usually private ticketing – book the session and only your group of friends play the escape room. Prices for escape rooms start from around 20,000 won per person
($17 USD, £13 GBP) but it varies depending on the number of people and discount sites such as Coupang and Ticketmonster.

 

Recently Intervirals asked on Reddit for any information about escape rooms in South Korea and this was the best comment, thanks to user /u/uReallyShouldTrustMe –

“Whenever something starts up in Korea and sticks, a million more try to take a piece of the market share and start with promotional deals.

Generally, only the ones in Itaewon, Sinchon, Gangnam, Myeongdong, and Hongdae are English friendly. Some also have availability in Chinese or Japanese.

Some places have English explanations, but the staff doesn’t speak English which makes “hints” quite difficult. About 90% do not offer English at all.”

 

Where is the best escape room to play in South Korea?
Redditors recommended Seoul Escape’s Hongdae branch and the room – Chairman’s Office numerous times for good design, entertainment value and for being friendly to english speakers. Also to note, Seoul Escape is highly rated on TripAdvisor with visitors.

Did you know?
While researching escape rooms in South Korea – an article mentioned private detectives aren’t allowed to legally practice in South Korea. This is due to legislation that hasn’t been approved by the government. As escape rooms require deductive reasoning skills – it must be interesting for South Koreans to experience what it feels like to be a detective.

===

* South Korea: Escape Room vs. Room Escape Terminology *
Seoul Escape – Escape Room
Code K – Escape Room
XEscape – Escape Room
The Q Escape – Escape Room Cafe
Cube Escape – Escape Room Cafe

Esc – Room Escape
Ex-Cape – Room Escape
Sherlock Holmes – Room Escape
Mystery Room Escape – Room Escape
Room Escape Busan – Room Escape
Escape Cube – Room Escape
Mirror Escape – Room Escape
The Clue – Room Escape / Room Escape Cafe
Open The Door – Room Escape Cafe
Beat Phobia – Room Escape Cafe

===
Results
Escape Room: 5/15
Room Escape: 10/15

Notes:
– Small sample size of South Korean escape room businesses that could be found on Google
– If a business clearly mentioned the word cafe on their website or social media it was noted
– With help from Google Translate  ❤

– Essa  🙂

 

GCHQ’s Fiendish Christmas Puzzle Book for 2016 – A licence to puzzle

Last Christmas, GCHQ – the codebreaking department of the UK government – released a puzzle in the director’s Christmas card. The puzzle was a nonogram, also known as a picross and it received widespread media attention, as it was called “the world’s hardest puzzle”. Read up on it here.

Some of the best codebreakers at GCHQ have been working hard to create this year’s puzzle, as it was released in conjunction with a GCHQ puzzle book.

The first stage of the puzzle starts with the image below – a Sudoku puzzle adapted to contain 9 letters instead of numbers and a grid of famous faces. If you get stuck on the below puzzle, check this
Reddit sub for some clues. Solve the two puzzles to unlock a website address and proceed to the next stage of the competition.

In addition, the GCHQ puzzle book is a necessary companion to the competition and contains “ciphers and substitution codes, tests of numeracy and literacy as well as picture and music challenges.” – GCHQ.

Plus HRH Duchess of Cambridge – Kate Middleton, wrote the foreword to the book and reveals her grandmother worked at Bletchley Park during World War II. Sales of GCHQ’s puzzle book will go to a mental health charity set up by Kate, William and Harry.

Get codebreaking ASAP as this year’s competition closes on February 28^th 2017.

//Other Escape Room News
– Endgame: The third and final book in the Endgame series is being released on December 27^th 2016.
As it stands, no one has yet claimed the prize money for the second novel, Sky Key.

– Captain America (Chris Evans) has released a competition to raise funds for charity. If you are the lucky winner, you and three friends will get flown to Boston in the US to play an escape room with him. It’s $10 USD for 100 competition entries and more information can be found on the omaze website.

Raising money for charity, Superhero-Celebrity and Escape Rooms.. what's not to like about this!https://t.co/uXZh3pRnen

— Escape Games Review (@EscGamesReview) December 2, 2016

– Essa 🙂

PAX Australia 2016 Escape Room Panel and 5 Min Q&A with Escape Rossio team

PAX Australia – The Past, Present and Future of Live Action Escape Games

For the second year running, the escape room panel at PAX Australia is a great insight into into what’s happening within the escape room industry in Australia. The Lock Me If You Can team were in attendance and have a great summary of the panel here while the entire one hour panel can be seen on Youtube here.

The panel covered topics in escape room classification, puzzle design and how virtual reality/artificial intelligence could be adapted for use in escape rooms.

Also during the panel – a representative from Labryinth Rooms discussed developing a large multiplayer game for Australia! It would involve actors as zombies with a tentative date of April 2017. To deal with large numbers of players within the game, the team are looking at SCRAP’s model and are looking into visual puzzles or interactive actor puzzles (eg. distract a zombie).

—–

5 Minute Q&A with Escape Rossio team

The team behind Escape Rossio in Portugal did a mini Q&A for the blog recently –

– What inspired you to create your escape room (tv shows, movies)?
First of all, books and movies from Dan Brown. These are the main inspirations.

We enjoy following leads and clues. To find mysteries and investigate. For several years we studied cosmogony, conspiracies and historical secrets. Our escape room allows us to share in a scenic, immersive and interactive way – all the conclusions from our investigations.

– If you could create an escape room about anything, what would it be about?
We currently have one escape game. The objective is not exactly to escape but to reach the end of an ancient ritual. Therefore we would create our next room also thinking about this objective.
As we found the Illuminati theme to be rather good and interesting, we would probably stick to it.

Our escape room offers the experience of the first steps into an Illuminati Order so we would try to find place for the upcoming steps. There are many degrees and their history is vast so we could make several escape rooms based on those with different rituals, enigmas, scenarios, etc.

Also there is a particular part which we love, and that is that Lisbon is one of three sacred cities for the Illuminati, being the others: Jerusalem and Rome. We can’t currently proceed to those places but we would definitely love to create two more escape rooms in those cities.

—–

Other Escape Room News:
– The Escape Hunt Group has been acquired for USD $23.5 million in November 2016, covering 207 escape rooms and 46 brick-and-mortar stores located in 27 different countries (Source).