Despite our adrenaline, panic, and thrill, my group did not successfully complete our room at Ottawa’s Escape Manor. Yet for me, the lack of success didn’t matter; the experience was still as rewarding as if we had won.
My group of six, which included colleagues and friends of all different skill sets, were not able to break out of the Asylum room before having a full-frontal lobotomy performed on us by a deranged doctor.
The concept of Escape Manor is simple and effective. You and a group are stuck in a room with no clear objective besides escaping and surviving. The room is filled with locks, clues, and decoys, with the final goal of finding a key to unlock the main door and run to safety before your 45-minute countdown concludes.
As previously mentioned, my group and I did the Asylum room, which is one of the most popular rooms at Escape Manor. It is decorated like an old, odious operating room, with plenty of fake blood, eerie wall warnings, and real X-rays scattered through the room. It is also one of the easiest rooms for beginner escapers.
For the first 15 minutes or so, my group may as well have been kicking walls and speaking to each other in different languages. There is definitely a learning curve in dealing with the rooms and puzzles. For beginners, even in the easy rooms, it may take a little bit of time to wrap your mind around the rules and tricks of the games. What you’ll quickly discover while trapped in the walls of the escape rooms is the importance of communication and direction.
However, once you get rolling, the puzzles become thrilling. Waves of adrenaline will crash against you and your team each time you complete a puzzle, making you even more confident to take on the next objective.
Every success you have in the room also feels genuine and rewarding, even if it is cleverly designed to show you exactly where you need to go next. As the puzzles were solved, the room evolved, and it became clear the task was more complex than it initially seemed.
If you can get yourself a solid team who that handle the stress and coordination the rooms will demand (there was a fair bit of yelling and bickering at the start of our escape), the Escape Manor is an affordable and exciting experience in Ottawa that will both challenge and reward its players.
