Month: February 2018

Escape rooms may have started their history in Japan, but the Americans later proved to be the masters of the genre. Well-crafted scripts, blockbuster sets, and even actors who skillfully enhance your instincts of fear and anxiety, bring such a development to the landscape of this industry that you often feel like part of an incredibly terrifying story, a thriller that surpasses even the most subtle limits of your imagination.

These are the scariest escape rooms currently operating in the U.S.:

«The Basement» – Los Angeles

From the title alone, you understand that here you will find yourself confronted with your darkest fears. Shortly before the game begins, you are hooded and led with your group into a chained cage. There, the hoods are removed and the game begins, facing a bloody scene, in the old room of the dead mother of a psychopathic serial killer with cannibalistic instincts. You have only one hour to escape, solving puzzles and deciphering clues that will open the door to freedom, before you find yourself on the plate of the cannibalistic killer! For many, the scariest room in all of Los Angeles.

Noriko – Toronto

One of the most successful horror escape room scenarios that has haunted houses and spirit hunting as its theme. An atmosphere that makes you shiver from the very first moment you enter this spooky abandoned house, which once used to house the family of the beautiful Noriko, in Osaka, Japan. Today it is inhabited only by spirits who ask you to put the puzzle pieces in order in order to offer them the peace and justice they seek. Mystery, theatricality, deadly secrets and deadly elements that remain well hidden inside the house. Ideal room for large groups but also for fans of the genre who are not easily scared. Characteristic here is the participation of actors who stretch your nerves and endurance even more!

«The Caretaker» – Orlando

Locked in a wooden cabin, somewhere well hidden in the forests of Oregon, you and your friends must escape, avoiding wolves – monsters that roam free in nature and are the creation of a perverted geneticist. The difference, however, with other escape rooms is that you must free one more person from the room outside the company. This is a defenseless and helpless elderly resident of this cabin, who goes by the name of “The Caretaker” and may not be as innocent as he seems. Horror, suspense and adventure in one of the most atmospheric escape rooms in Orlando.

«The Unknown» – Toronto

It belongs to the category of the most famous horror-escape rooms in America and has managed to become the talk of the town in the circles of escape room junkies mainly for one reason: Your mission in this room remains unknown from beginning to end. What makes it so exciting is that the action, the elements and the surprises alternate in an extremely terrifying setting that has so far managed to stay away from the revelations of spoilers. The company's website gives absolutely no information about what you will encounter, nor do the game masters tell you the slightest detail until the end. However, the two rules that are communicated to you right from the start and remain inviolable are that you must be over 18 years old and not have serious health problems (mainly heart problems). Comments from those who have visited confirm the fact that it is indeed necessary to be an adult to play in this room (and it has nothing to do with sexual-type tests, as they emphasize) as well as to be able to withstand high pressure and stress conditions.

«Spooky room 479″ – New York

With a mere 25% successful escape rate -to date- from the room, Spooky room 479, remains one of the most challenging in the American community of escape room fans. The story takes us to the dormitories of a college student. There is also the haunted room 479 from which you must escape. But until this happens, you are confronted with mysterious entities (here actors also participate) and metaphysical phenomena that, thanks to the well-crafted digital audio and video media used, there are many times when you feel fear overwhelm you.

«The Hex Room» – Los Angeles

This atmospheric themed escape room has managed to create the ideal gaming conditions for groupies of mainstream American thriller films. Its peculiarity, however, lies in the fact that each player is locked in a different room, depending on the answers they have given earlier to the questions of a psychological test. The test also determines the role you will have in the game, and therefore the room you will be locked in. So, a detective, a nerd, an athlete, a virgin, a rebel and a prom queen emerge. The motto of the company is that each person, individually, must fight not only to escape but also to save their life. And they will only understand this if they start on time, cooperating with their neighbor or with the person locked in the opposite room…

The rapid and certainly spectacular spread of the fame of escape rooms in America, in recent years, could not have gone unnoticed by the hounds of major television series production companies such as HBO, which has so far introduced worldwide great hits to fans of television series everywhere. Productions, therefore, such as Veep, Silicon Valley and Game of Thrones, which have been loved by as few as a few TV series junkies, were transferred in March 2017, for the needs of the South by Southwest film and music festival, in Texas, to specially designed spaces in which groups of players were locked up who were then invited to escape, having only 45 minutes at their disposal. The rooms communicated with each other in such a way that you could not move to the next one if you had not first unlocked the door of the previous one.

Of course, the best impressions of the audience were gathered by the themed room dedicated to Game of Thrones, which transported you to the frozen and snow-covered Castle Black, with such accuracy and detail that you felt like you would actually meet John Snow on horseback. What remains remarkable is the number of people who passed through these rooms in three days, which exceeded 1,500.

A few days later, the rooms traveled to UCLA, as part of another festival, UCLA Geek Week. Tickets may have sold out within hours, but those who weren't lucky enough to get in were content with a few selfies on the Game of Thrones-style Iron Throne, a faithful replica of the famous Iron Throne.

Of course, even before HBO decided to commercially exploit the potential of the escape room industry, some international television networks used the idea of ​​room escape, designing interactive games in which live players attempted to escape one or more rooms and win significant cash prizes. The most popular TV shows that relied on this philosophy, even creating huge waiting lists for prospective participants, are “Fort Boyard” (a French television game show that was also presented in our country by Christos Ferentino in the period 2004-2008) and the popular, mainly among the British audience, “The Crystal Maze”. In particular, Fort Boyard, which began in France in 1990 – and continues to be shown there today – was set in an 18th-century castle, on a rocky island in the middle of the Atlantic, where five players went through tough and clever tests in order for one of them to win the cash prize. The game was shown in many different countries, from Greece, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Finland to the USA and Canada, and was a huge success in most of them. However, similar productions were also staged in China, Japan and Indonesia, albeit in different variations of the well-known game.

As for the legendary “The Crystal Maze”, it is by far the coolest adventure and escape game show that made its mark in Great Britain in the early 90’s, and which was recently announced to be returning with a new series to the British small screens. In our country, it arrived in the mid-90’s with the title “Crystal World”. It started, in fact, on the old SKAI and continued on STAR, bringing to our living rooms, on Saturday mornings, the inimitable Richard O’ Brien, the bald presenter with the characteristic spooky physiognomy.

The game, for the oldies to remember and for the new ones to learn, was as follows: Six players, three men, three women, went through various tests through four zones, corresponding to today's escape rooms, with the goal of collecting as many crystals as possible. These zones were: The Aztec zone, the Industrial zone, the Medieval zone and the Futuristic zone. At the end of each game, the participants entered a crystal dome and, depending on the crystals they had collected from each zone, they won the corresponding time to collect 100 golden cards and receive the grand prize.

The area used to set up the game was approximately the size of two football pitches, while the cost of the sets exceeded 200,000 British pounds. Of course, Channel 4 executives rubbed their hands with satisfaction every time they received the ratings. Over 6 million viewers tuned in to Crystal Maze each time, setting a record for viewing figures among British television games.

In our country, the game, due to its spectacular response from the public, was also released in a tabletop version by MB games. It may no longer be found in stores, but those who bought it back then and managed to save it from the ravages of time to this day have every reason to feel happy because they now hold in their hands a collector's item.

From Dan Brown with the legendary Da Vinci Code and the explosive Illuminati thriller, J. K. Rowling with the charismatic Harry Potter, to the classic masterpieces of Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities, The Haunted House), Jules Verne (Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express), Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and Stephen King (The Shining, Missery, The Mist, It, etc.), literature has always found its rightful place in the field of search for themes in Greek and foreign Escape Rooms.

However, you don't have to make an entire journey to enter King's mysterious world, no matter how fan or crazy you claim to be. The themed room "Tiranny" of Escapepolis, in Metaxourgeio, brings to life in a chillingly realistic and atmospheric version the pages of the masterpiece Misery (King's book that inspired director Rob Reiner to adapt it for the big screen in the early 1990s), raising the level of anxiety and suspense to the heights, until you finally manage to escape from the "prison" of the mentally disturbed nurse Annie Wilkes (played in the film by Kathy Bates).

When the global escape room industry meets Hollywood, the results can only be spectacular. The boundaries between fantasy and reality blur in adventurous and mysterious paths, bringing suspense, anxiety and adrenaline to the forefront.

Some of the best and all-time classic films of the world cinema have already inspired script and direction, escape rooms all over the world, conveying with skill and sophisticated technological means - this happens in most of them at least - the atmosphere of the film.

Heroes and characters who made history on the big screen and whose fame was identified with the big names of the actors who played them, are once again "starring" in themed escape rooms in every corner of the world: Harrison Ford, on the one hand, as Indiana Jones who gets involved in risky adventures and on the other hand as a ruthless "fugitive" (The Fugitive), Johnny Depp as the infamous bank robber John Dillinger in the film Public Enemies, Tim Robbins as the genius fugitive Andy Dufresne in "Rita Hathworth's Last Great Escape"), Clint Eastwood as the criminal Frank Morris in "Escape from Alcatraz", Steve McQueen as Captain Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape and even Jack Nicholson ως ο σχιζοφρενής αλκοολικός συγγραφέας Jack Torrance με τα δολοφονικά ένστικτα στο κλασικό «The Shining» του Stephen King.

Fans of retro situations will surely remember the war film Das Boot (1981) by Wolfgang Petersen, which takes us to the period of World War II and to one of the submarines of the German fleet. during his mission in the Atlantic Ocean. For many escape room fans, this film later served as the starting point for the birth of many script ideas - mainly of a war nature - that were ideally suited to setting up escape rooms, especially since underwater adventures have always attracted their own dynamic audience, mainly male.

Another important milestone film in the escape room industry could be considered Clue (also known as On the Trail of Mystery). The script of this cult American mystery comedy is clearly inspired by the well-known board game Cluedo. The film has now become as beloved as few escape room creators, especially in America.

But even the most modern film successes are becoming objects of study (and often even copying) by large escape room chains. Typical examples are the films: Panic Room, Harry Potter, Phone Booth, The experiment, Titanic, Cabin in the Woods House on Haunted Hill, Silent Hill, The Game, Saw, etc.

Of course, Alfred Hitchcock, also known as the "Lord of Suspense", could not be left out of the game, with many themed escape rooms, mainly in America, honoring his contribution to the history of psychological thrillers and adventure thrillers. At the top of the escape room themes today are the films "Rear Window" and "Psycho".

As for sci-fi adventures, these are consistently the top choices of escape room players: From the all-time classic films Alphaville (1965) by Jean-Luc Godard, 2001:A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick, THX 1138 (1971) by George Lucas, Star Wars (1977) also by George Lucas, Aliens (1979) by Ridley Scott, E.T. (1982) by Steven Spielberg and The Abyss (1989) by James Cameron, to the more modern ones, The Cube (1997) by Vincenzo Natali, The Matrix (1990) by Lana Wachowski, Planet of the Apes (2001) by Tim Burton and Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013) by Alfonso Cuarón.