Escape New Haven: A Locked-Room Adventure For Puzzle Fans

We love our comfort, and we generally go through great pains to make sure we are safe from harm and from our fears. And then we turn around and pay to encounter those scary (and often exciting) things that we’d never want to experience in our everyday lives: jumping out of airplanes, swimming with sharks, or careening around a race track in a two-ton death trap on wheels.

Add locked-room mysteries — like the ones opening up around the region — to that list of panic-inducing thrills.

Finding yourself trapped in a room with no clear-cut escape route, but instead a series of puzzles to solve, to gain your freedom isn’t necessarily as adrenaline-pumping as, say, bungee-jumping, though it’s also not really something people wish on themselves. But real-life room-escape games are becoming increasingly popular, with start-ups making their way out of New York and Los Angeles and into our own backyards. Connecticut has two room-escape facilities in New Haven and Middletown.

Real-life room-escape games are modeled after the popular online “escape the room” genre, a point-of-view, point-and-click adventure game where players find themselves locked inside a room and the only way out is to solve a series of puzzles that leads to the exit. You gather objects and clues by clicking on anything and everything, because almost anything can be a clue, from the decor or color scheme to shapes in the furniture to numbers scrawled on found pieces of paper and under desks.

While it wasn’t the first incarnation of the online escape-the-room game, Toshimitsu Takagi’s “Crimson Room” began popularizing the genre around 2004. These days, a simple Google search for “room escape games” returns more games than any one player could hope to complete. In the real-life version, participants are “locked” together in a room for a pre-determined amount of time (usually an hour), and left to work out the puzzles as a group to escape from their confinement. It puts everyone’s critical thinking skills to the test, since it’s impossible to know what in the room is important and what isn’t.

Just like the online version, the clues and answers for each puzzle are strewn about, hidden and findable, though not necessarily in any kind of workable order. So participants have to pay close attention to determine what, if anything, is part of which puzzle, or needed down the line somewhere, and what needs to be found or done to move on to the next step.

It was in one of these room-escape games in New York that Yale grad Ethan Rodriguez-Torrent, co-founder of Escape New Haven, had an “I can do this better” moment and decided to get into the room-escape game business. He and Max Sutter, an Escape New Haven co-founder and also a Yale grad, came up with some puzzles, set up a room-escape beta scenario in the garage of Sutter’s condo, and invited some friends to check it out.

“It lasted about a week before the condo association shut us down,” Rodriguez-Torrent says, mostly because they had built a partition inside of the garage. But they were able to negotiate some time to keep the thing open and have their friends try it out; the friends then told other friends, and so on.

“We started on a Monday, and by Thursday we were having groups come in who we’d never met. So that to us was a pretty solid validation of the concept,” Rodriguez-Torrent says.

The beta testers agreed that they would pay money to play the game in the real world. Not long after the beta test run, Rodriguez-Torrent started looking for a permanent home for the venture. In January of this year, Escape New Haven found its home on Whitney Avenue, in the lower-level rear section of a house once owned by former U.S. President William Howard Taft, and it has been open since mid-February. Rodriguez-Torrent, Sutter and friend Dylan Connor have since made that room-escape idea a reality.

Escape New Haven houses three different escape scenarios: the Workshop, for two to four players; the Library, for two to six players; and the Space Station, for two to nine players, which is the newest scenario and opened in mid-June after replacing the Studio. To keep things fresh, Escape New Haven will rotate out each scenario after a certain amount of time. The Workshop is the next scenario due for retirement, and is playable through September, when it will be replaced with a horror-themed scenario just in time for Halloween. The Workshop is essentially a reworked version of the beta scenario from Max Sutter’s garage.

The game begins when all of a scenario’s participants are ushered into the game room and sealed in for the hour. From there, it’s up to the players to take stock of everything around them and start looking around for things that might be clues. The computer versions of these games require the player to click on everything in sight to determine if it’s part of the game. In real life, the possibilities are far greater in a room where you can physically touch everything. You may, for example, find a notebook with a series of numbers written on a page, which could turn out to be a lock combination. Inside whatever is unlocked by this combination could be a piece of a machine or another lock combination, or a code word, or a map, or one of a series of objects relating to another puzzle. You may find a key and not know which lock it opens because you’ve already found four locks. It sounds like it could be overwhelming, especially knowing the clock is ticking. Are you wasting time trying to figure out how to open a locked box when what you really need to move forward is in a drawer on the other side of the room?

One of Escape New Haven’s key features is a surveillance system inside each scenario, where players are monitored by an operator. This helps Rodriguez-Torrent and his team make sure that everything is running smoothly, and that each group isn’t going off the rails in its attempt to solve the puzzle.

This differs from Rodriguez-Torrent’s first room-escape experience in New York, where someone was physically in the room with his group telling the players what they didn’t need to be touching, and giving hints “at his discretion,” he says. This made the experience less immersive than it should have been, in Rodriguez-Torrent’s mind. With the surveillance systems, “the team would just be on their own in the room, and it would feel very immersive, but we would also be able to monitor them and help them out if they needed help,” he says.

The quality of the puzzles also determines if the players will get stuck and founder, or maybe need just a little nudge in the right direction in order to keep moving. “My main idea was to tighten [the game] up a bit, so that they wouldn’t need somebody telling them what they couldn’t touch, or what they couldn’t rip open,” says Rodriguez-Torrent.

Players are given a short set of ground rules before they play. “We basically say, ‘Be safe, don’t break our venue, and don’t use anything that you bring in with you to help you solve the puzzles, and beyond that you’re free to do whatever you want,'” he says. Since players can touch things in the room that might not be necessary to solve the puzzle within the hour, the operators have a longer list of things to check and reset before the next group comes in, but Rodriguez-Torrent says he prefers to do it this way rather than limit the players.

When planning for a new scenario, Rodriguez-Torrent and his team sit down for “three-hour brainstorming sessions” and try to think of new ways to basically mess with the people who’ll come pay money to be messed with. They’ll go over their ideas and make sure any suggested puzzles meet a few specific criteria, such as fitting the planned theme, being feasible in terms of cost or technical needs — and if it’s solvable.

“If it passes all those tests, we put it in the pile of things that we like,” says Rodriguez-Torrent.

Brainstorming sessions for the Space Station led to a selection of 50 puzzles, which was narrowed down to around 30. “But that’s OK because we’ll use the other puzzles next time,” says Rodriguez-Torrent.

And it’s not just the Escape New Haven team coming up with these puzzles. “Half or maybe a third of new puzzles in the new scenario are puzzles from people who’ve been here,” says Rodriguez-Torrent. “The people who come here, they’re the type of person who’s creative and likes puzzles and likes games, so I want their collective minds to be challenging everyone who comes after them. So, people give us puzzle ideas, and now we’re not only drawing from our own creativity and our own way of thinking, but we’re drawing from everybody’s way of thinking in challenging the next group.”

Outside perspectives and minds are useful not only for thinking of new puzzles, but also for testing those puzzles to make sure they are solvable by people who didn’t conceive them. Rodriguez-Torrent says they’ll have at least one beta test group come in to test the limits of a new scenario before it goes live. “For our first scenario, it was very hard for us to calibrate what was difficult because we had come up with the puzzles,” he says. “So our tendency was to say ‘This is too easy,’ but it turned out it was too hard.”

Now that he has some experience conceiving and building these puzzles, he says calibrating has gotten easier. The original beta test of the Workshop back in that garage was intended to be a half-hour-long game, but ended up needing an hour, which is the set time frame for each of Escape New Haven’s current scenarios.

>>Escape New Haven, 111 Whitney Ave., is open Thursday and Friday evenings and on weekends. Tickets are $26 for adults, and $22 for students and kids ages 10 to 17. Parking is available behind the building. Visit escapenewhaven.com or call 860-576-9997 to see which scenarios are still open for booking each week, and how many slots are available. Private groups can also inquire about booking the whole venue.

Another escape option includes Adventure Rooms, 282 Main St. Ext., Middletown. Information: 860-358-9310 and myadventurerooms.com.