This is an escape room: An immersive puzzle-solving experience that will test your mental and problem-solving skills and for everyone's delight, is being offered in English and Chinese.
An escape room is basically a version of real life but inside a “video game” where you are trapped in a room along with some other participants and you must explore around you until you can find the key to escape within a certain period. of time. Some escape rooms are purely problem solving, while others have a story with an immersive atmosphere to drive the participants' action.
In recent years, Escape Rooms have become very popular. Since the first instances of the game began around the year 2000, the number of fixed escape rooms has grown to approximately 3,000 globally, with the number of participants reaching approximately 1.6 million.
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Escape Room in Asakusa
In Japan, the SCRAP corporation is the pioneer in the genre and is very popular among Japanese puzzle fans. In addition to offering various settings for their escape rooms, they also host large-scale special events. For example, they once held an escape event at the Tokyo Dome.
Since 2015, SCRAP began offering two of its most popular escape rooms, Escape from the Red Room (赤い部屋からの脱出) and Escape from the Haunted Manor (お化け屋敷からの脱出), both have versions in English and Chinese at the Real Escape Room Asakusa. Both cost ¥ 1,800 in advance and ¥ 2,300 at the door.
The Escape from the Red Room seems extremely simple, but it isn't. Six participants are locked in a room painted entirely red, with nothing but two locked doors. They have 30 minutes to figure out the code that will unlock the exit, something that only about 3% of groups manage to do. Fortunately, participants can get an extension of 10 minutes for an additional ¥ 800, but even then, the success rate is about 15%.
Escape from the Haunted Manor has a rather spooky story as it concerns a murdered child and strange disappearances that horror fans will love. The gameplay is more engaging than Escape from the Red Room, combining elements of haunted house, treasure hunting, and problem-solving, in addition to low lights and high tension and scary music to distract and frighten. The cost and time rules are the same as Red Room.
Other Escape Room
For the third consecutive year, SCRAP is also collaborating with Tokyo Metro to offer The Underground Mysteries (ザ・アンダーグラウンドミステリーズ), a problem-solving game that takes you around the Tokyo subway system to find clues. If you can complete all the puzzles, you can enter the final answer on the SCRAP website to complete the game. Starting in 2015, this game began to be offered in English and Chinese.
Unlike the traditional Escape Room format, The Underground Mysteries allows you to solve the puzzle at your own pace. In addition to the game materials, it includes an entire day with the Tokyo Metro open only for the event, so participants can move freely between the stations and it takes about four hours to complete the game. One of the cool things about the game is that participants can access places they normally wouldn't be able to visit.
With multiple languages and a variety of different games now available, there is nothing to stop you from pitting your brain against SCRAP puzzle masters if you are in Japan, except, perhaps, a bit of claustrophobia. But still, you won't feel like the walls are closing in on you. Unless, of course, they really are closing in...
There is also an Escape Room in Brazil in the city of São Paulo. To conclude, we will leave some links that may help you learn more about an Escape Room.
- Scrap's official website
- Tokyo official website
