Elm City Escape is New Haven’s brand new escape room. (Schae Beaudoin/The Daily Campus)
Elm City Escape, New Haven’s newest escape room, offers a fun and creative way to test your creativity and problem-solving skills. Their current room is called “The Initiative,” which involves escaping from an office setting that holds some dark secrets.
Escape rooms have become wildly popular, with locations all around the world and even on campus. Typically, a group of people are “locked” in a room, and through puzzles, games and observations they gather information to be able to “escape.” They are usually timed, giving participants around 60 minutes to complete it.
Escape rooms typically have interesting themes that make the process more fun and realistic, and Elm City Escape does not disappoint. “The Initiative” at first seems like a regular office room, with participants being told they are new employees, but it very quickly becomes obvious that something is wrong, and it is up to the employees to stop their evil boss.
The description of the room online says, “It’s your first day of work at OMNE CORP! This is your dream job! Right…? Although you’re excited to begin, you can’t help but feel that something is wrong… It seems your boss and OMNE might be hiding a secret behind the company’s new initiative. Can you find out the truth about your new employer before it’s too late?”
A group of writers from the DC’s life section, myself included, visited Elm City Escape to test the room out for ourselves, and we were pleasantly surprised. The puzzles were intellectually stimulating and challenging, but not impossible. There were several different types of puzzles, such as figuring out lock combinations, that were really fun to solve.
The theme of the room was also really interesting, and finding new pieces of information that uncovered the truth behind OMNE CORP added an extra element of suspense. It was exciting to go through the steps and figure out what would end up happening at the end.
When we arrived at Elm City, we were greeted by Crystal and Joe, the masterminds behind the escape room. They gave us an inside look at the process behind creating an escape room and explained what made them want to open up their own escape room.
“We were all escape room enthusiasts, so before we opened this we played them all over.” Crystal said. “One thing we appreciated was originality. We wanted to showcase our own talents.”
The room definitely does show off their own talents, including graphic designs created by members of their team and many different elements of puzzles that they have also created on their own.
“We have a lot of thoughts behind the scenes,” Crystal said. “We want to aim at a plain office, but there is a lot more underneath. You enter this office and don’t know what to expect.”
“The story progresses as you go on,” Joe added.
Elm City Escape will be opening within the next few weeks. “The Initiative” is currently their only room, but another room with a skull-and-bones secret society theme is currently under development. They are located on Elm Street in New Haven, CT and can be contacted through their website http://www.elmcityescape.com.
Melissa Scrivani is a campus correspondent for The Daily Campus. She can be reached via email at melissa.scrivani@uconn.edu.