Escape Room Review– Trapped Puzzle Rooms– Twin Cities, Minnesota
During the height of the pandemic, one escape room company proved particularly helpful at helping me stay connected to my friends and have a little fun– Trapped Puzzle Rooms in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Though I live a state away, they have some terrific options for anybody living anywhere, as long as they have a reliable Internet connection and an up-to-date electronic device.
One of the innovations Trapped provides is audio escape rooms. With the help of a laptop (or tablet, though phones may not be as effective), you join up on Disqus at an assigned time and then a game master joins you. You can all play in the same room with a single computer (with at least one exception, which will be addressed later), or you can play in different buildings and even states, as my friends and I did. In these games, you communicate purely through talking, and your game master narrates the situations, with artwork and certain visual puzzles appearing on your screens at various points throughout the games. You tell the game master what you want to do, and what steps you’ll try, and the game master tells you if your idea works or not. For example, you can look at a picture of a desk, and say, “Open the drawer and look inside.” The game master will say, “there’s a red key there.” You’ll then reply, “Try to use the red key on the red box on the mantlepiece.” And so on and so forth.
I should point out that most of the puzzles are far more complex than “find a key, put it in the lock, and repeat.” These puzzles generally include details that can only be performed in the freedom of one’s mind, and require close observation, memory, and creativity.
Before I go further, I want to take a moment to mention my appreciation for the artist who creates the illustrations for all of these games. Seriously, the person who does this is incredibly talented, able to work in many different styles, and able to incorporate clues in clever and stylistic manners. This person ought to have a thriving career, and I need to commend the artist (whose name, unfortunately, I do not know) for a job exceedingly well done. Also, all of our game masters were outstanding.
My friends and I have played all nine of their audio rooms and won all of them, but more importantly, we had tons of fun. The first room, “Herbert’s Laboratory,” has you visiting a laboratory with a remarkable secret. The puzzles include a level of imagination and fantastic occurrences that couldn’t be duplicated in a brick-and-mortar room, and like all of the audio escape rooms, it requires imagination, creativity, and thinking outside the box.
These attributes are especially important in “Prehistoric Park,” where you have to survive in a theme park filled with actual dinosaurs. (I needn’t explain the reference, do I?). You can’t just use logic on these puzzles, sometimes you have to make an intellectual leap. At least three times over the course of the game, I said, “This is a really stupid idea, but I’m going to suggest…” I say this without boasting but with amazement that I was right every time. Once again, the dinosaurs do things in this puzzle that you have to use your imagination for, and you couldn’t replicate these puzzles in the real world, even with the most advanced animatronics.
“Super Squad” has you and your friends protecting a science museum, but along the way, each of you gets a special mutant power that allows you to solve puzzles, either alone or in a group, everybody playing to their strengths. “Heist Heist Baby” has your group working together to stage a theft at a casino. This room requires two separate devices, as at one point your group must split into two teams and work together while not seeing each other’s screens. Notably, each room has slightly different puzzles, which require different thinking skills and approaches.
“Pirate’s Plunder” has you going on a journey on a tropical island, searching for treasure, and then going on a long sea voyage. The images are lovely and oil-painting-like. There’s observational skill puzzles, pirate-themed riddles, and much more. “Monster Smash” has you exploring a haunted house and meeting a lot of classic horror characters along the way.
If you’re still in the holiday mood, try “Holiday Whodunit”– a Christmas-themed room that’s also a mystery. Grandmother Winter has been run over by a reindeer at the North Pole– she’s alive, but injured. Santa recruits you to figure out which one of his reindeer is the villain. The artwork has a marvelous Dr. Seuss vibe to it.
Then there’s “Spirit Train,” a delightful, extra-long game inspired by Hayao Miyazaki, where the puzzles and their lessons are unlike anything else I’ve ever played. The most recent room is over a year old, “Escape From Escape Island,” where you explore a mysterious, technologically complex island that features aspects of the most popular escape room themes.
Though they’re no longer doing it as far as I can tell, a couple of years ago we played their in-person room “The Heist” through the Internet– the room was shown to us through a video camera, and our game master was our avatar, and he handled the items in the room as we played the game. It’s set in an art gallery, and you have to solve puzzles to retrieve a stolen painting. It was a lot of fun, and if it’s an example of their other in-person rooms, then if you’re ever in the Twin Cities, I highly recommend a visit.
If you want to try an audio escape room, Trapped Puzzle Rooms is a must-do experience for escape room fans.
–Chris Chan
Chris Chan’s anthology Of Course He Pushed Him and Other Sherlock Holmes Stories Volumes 1 & 2 was released on June 22nd. His first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released by MX Publishing. His Agatha-nominated book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books. His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there). It is also available in a Kindle edition.
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