You Won’t Believe What Escape Room Staff Have Seen People Do—Prepare to Be Shocked and Amused!
they talked for a bit and then nodded and went around the place and threw everything in the center of the room and when they were done they were done with throwing the went to the pile and looked through and they found the hints effective but messy
my brother said it was annoying to clean it up there was so much stuff.
To repeat what ive said in this sort of thread before:
If it would take an apathetic employee more than 5-10minutes to reset, then *no* it is not the solution (no kicking a hole in the drywall wont reveal a special chest unless you paid a heck of a lot for your hour and there is a freshly plastered and painted patch of wall right at shin height).
Escape Room employee here! The owner of our competitors came in and did our most difficult room. We warned him that it was a tough one but he just shrugged us off with “I’m good with these”. Well when the time was up, we went into the room and noticed that every single padlock and combination lock was off. Weirdly, the easier puzzles were left unsolved. When asked about it, he complained that this room was too difficult and that he had picked the locks. Which of course in our rooms, messes up the order of the puzzles. He then complained to management about the room. We just shook our heads and wondered how they handled things at his escape room…
My ex-family owned an escape room, and one of their rooms had a old fashioned tape recorder. After only one group they had to remove it as no one knew how to put in the tape and press play. The group were in their 20s. Its crazy to think such a simple device can be so hard to use.
Also, off subject, I work at a cellphone store. We had an old rotary for display. a late teen picked it up and asked, “How can you even walk around with this? and where is the screen?” thinking it was a cellphone.
Had a group of engineers from Google doing a room, and this guy tried using trigonometry to solve a puzzle.
Posted this in an older thread:
I worked in an escape game that ran out of a historic castle-esque landmark in Toronto. Because we were set up in a tourist attraction, there was some stuff in the room that we couldn’t get rid of that needed to be there (light switches, fire alarms, etc.). So what we did is we just put stickers on everything that wasn’t “part of the game”. The stickers were bright red, and depicted a hand with a cross through it (i.e. Do Not Touch)
We would always give players a short spiel in the lobby at the start where we would tell them the rules, and every time we would show them the sticker and say “if you see this, it means the thing is not part of the game, but rather a real functioning thing, it will not do anything in the game, please do not touch.” We never had a problem with it until one day….
Bachelor party comes in all happy and a little tipsy (nothing too bad). We give them the spiel, they seem nice and eager, and we take them into the Tower where the game space is located. They enter the tower, the door shuts behind them, and the warning goes off that their time has begun.
Literally as the first thing that happens, maybe two seconds after time starts, one of the dudes bee-lines towards the fire alarm plastered with a bright red Do Not Touch sticker and pulls it.
There was a function going on at the attraction that evening too, and the whole castle had to be evacuated. Five fire trucks came.
This is my personal favorite when I’m running a room:
The puzzle: You find a pair of glasses and a folder with a small rectangle cut out of it. You put the glasses on and the previously plain white TV screen now reveals a list of Cites. Place the folder on the screen and the one important city is written the cut out gap.
What every single team always does: Puts the glasses on and then looks around the room with the folder pressed to their face, peeking through the gap in the folder.
It’s a void, cut out hole. There’s no filter, no lenses, you could stick your finger through the hope and wiggle it round, holding it to your face won’t help you.
So many things.
One thing that really got me though– They are all given blacklight flashlights at the beginning of the game. At one point, there was a case full of books that they eventually find a key for. The trick was that they all had secret messages within that lit up with the black lights.
They did not use the black lights. Instead… they thought they were supposed to READ THE BOOKS. Like… start to finish. There were at least 15 full books in the case. At this point they had about 35 minutes (out of an hour) to escape. They all just laid down and read the books for at least 20 minutes before they asked for a clue.
An employee of an escape room told me this one.
The room was in English, but one of the guys was Italian and for some unknown reason couldn’t communicate that he wanted to go to the toilet beforehand. So they go into the room, there is a bucket there that is supposed to be used as a clue, but this madman waits while the lights are still off (horror based room) and PEES IN THE BUCKET! And because the bucket was in a camera dead-zone and there was a sponge in it, they found out after the room was over.
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