By: Samantha Lindgren

What exactly are escape rooms and where did they come from?

Escape the Room games have been around since the early 2000s, and they are the inspiration for their live action counterpart. The first live escape room originated in 2006 in Asia, and the fad spread across the globe in different countries including the United States, Canada, Japan, Israel, and China with places popping up in the 2010s.

In Toronto, it feels like escape rooms are popping up on every corner. With so many to choose from it’s hard to pick out the great rooms from the mediocre ones. I went to two escape rooms in Toronto in the downtown area. The first room that I went to was Roundabout Canada.

Roundabout Canada opened around three years ago, and they have been going strong with excellent room design and clever puzzles. Roundabout Canada is located on the corner of Young Street and Dundas Street in the heart of the downtown core. I spoke with Kenneth Cheng who is one of the co-owners at Roundabout Canada and he talked about the roots behind making his business, “I was actually studying in Hong Kong in 2012 and 2013 that’s when there was a big boom in escape games in Hong Kong and Southeast China area, and I thought I could bring it back to Canada because I really enjoyed doing the escape games.”

Roundabout Canada offers five escape rooms that vary in difficulty starting with Final Destination as their easiest to Diamond Creed at their hardest. Final Destination is an abandoned plane based room where you have to escape to safely before the plane crashes. The room has a 45-minute time limit and fits 2-6 people. The rooms are all equipped with small flashlights what are either bolted to the wall/floor like in Back to the Mummy or with you. You need a flashlight because all the rooms at Roundabout Canada are done in the dark.

The other rooms are, The Butcher’s Basement where you are trying to escape an infamous serial killer in 45 minutes or less, The Prisoner where you and your group are wrongfully accused and locked up in different cells trying to escape before your execution date in 6o minutes, Back to the Mummy where you will be buried alive in 45 minutes if you don’t escape the pharaoh’s tomb and lastly Diamond Creed where your family has been kidnapped, and you have to steal a priceless diamond in a room full of moving lasers in 6o minutes or less. “We wanted to fit different people’s tastes, so a lot of misconceptions is that all escape rooms are scary, and it’s not. Only one of our five escape rooms is a scary theme, The butcher’s Basement. The other games are suitable for families,” said Cheng.

Escape rooms are great for groups of people because you get to know who you’re working with very quickly. Cheng said, “I thought it was a very good team building exercise and to hang out with friends on evenings after school and after work.”

Cheng recalled that Diamond Creed is his favourite room because it is the most high-tech. The room is a double room that involved slowly moving lasers that when they hit you, 15 seconds comes from your time and smoke to give it an eerie look.

I also spoke with Samantha Clare and Audrey Medrano, who are both senior associates at Roundabout Canada.

Samantha got addicted to playing escape rooms when she was in Korea, “The more I did, the more I wanted to do them,” she explained. She says her two favourite games at Roundabout Canada are, The Prisoner and The Butcher’s Basement. She likes The Prisoner because it is a full hour compared to the other 45 minute games. “it is very involved and immersive, and it requires a lot of group work and teamwork and communication,” said Clare. She likes the Butcher’s Basement because she likes to scare people, but not to be scared herself.

Audrey has been working at Roundabout Canada for three years; she started working there to work on her communication skills, and she thought it would help her break out of her shy shell. She loves working on the weekends where she would get to see over 200 people saying, “it’s kind of crazy, but I love it.” She likes to see all the excitement and fear from every guest.  “Every day is a different story,” she added.

Medrano also says her favourite room at Roundabout Canada is also The Butcher’s Basement. She likes the room because it is a triple room escape and because she likes the scarier rooms. She like that the puzzles in the room are very linear. That is meaning that each puzzle leads to another and so on and so forth. “There are certain rooms where you kind of get all the puzzles at the same time and you just don’t know what to do, and you get lost. I don’t like getting lost,” she added.

Roundabout opened because “I don’t want our future generations staring at computer monitors and not interacting. In my generation, we used to go out a lot and do different things with friends,” said Cheng.

When asked about the culture around escape rooms in Toronto Cheng said, “I think it’s growing up pretty healthy.” The first escape rooms were thrown together with a dollar store budget where it started as one locked box stuck inside one room. However, it has grown so rapidly that some rooms are having to fight to stay afloat because of all the advancements.

“In the past year, they have been becoming more and more popular, and more people have heard of them,” Clare added. She continued saying that people would come to escape rooms rather than go to the bar or the movies. She claims that there are a lot of people who come to Roundabout Canada while on a first date. “I think the future of escape rooms is an alternative way to spend time with people,” said Clare.

The second escape room I went to was Riddle Room. Riddle room is located on Young and Dundonald Street just steps away from Wellesley Station. Riddle Room has been operating since 2014 and it has a little something else to offer than other escape rooms, they have a game board café on site. Jeffery Liu who is one of the co-owners of Riddle room had this to say, “when we first opened there weren’t a lot of escape rooms that has a board game café attached to it. So once you did an escape room, you just left afterwards. We wanted to open up a space where people can spend basically the whole night here. Do an escape room, have fun at the café afterwards.”

Liu was in Beijing when he first heard about escape rooms, so when he came back to Canada in 2014, he was so inspired by escape rooms he wanted to do his own business. “As long as you can come up with decent puzzles and you can come up with decent props, anyone can do it. It’s just doing it well that has become more and more difficult nowadays,” said Liu. He knows that the business behind escape rooms are growing so rapidly that they have to keep up with the times or go out of business.

I also spoke with the other co-owner at Riddle Room Phil Cha who is the brains behind the business side of the escape room. He had more to say about the survival of escape rooms in Toronto. “As the industry is growing I think that there will be a culling. I think that a lot of the businesses that aren’t being run properly will slowly die off, and it’s because the industry will be evolving to a higher quality, bigger budget, higher barrier of entry, and what this does is that it kind of gets right of the ones that are kind of just squeaking by,” said Cha. He added by saying, “I think currently the environment in the escape rooms is an arms race which is fun because it’s all of us trying to innovate.”

I also talked to Morgan O’Brien who is the Social Media Coordinator and manager of Riddle Room. She is very passionate about storytelling and becoming different characters saying, “it kind of felt like playing make believe as a living and selling these experiences to people.” She continued saying, “it has this like childlike wonder to it that it just made me so excited to go into work every day, and I get that every single day working at Riddle Room which is phenomenal.”

“When you go to watch a movie, or you read a book, or you go to an interactive play you’re selling someone, someone else’s story. What I love about escape rooms is you’re buying your own story, you’re buying your own experience,” said O’Brien.

Riddle Room offers five escape rooms including a rage room. The rooms include Luci’s Room, The Castle, Static, Missing Anatomy, and Framed.

Luci’s Room is where you are searching for a missing girl in her abandoned bedroom before the clock runs out and you’re trapped there forever. The Castle is where you have to make your way out of the double room before it is too late.

Static is when you wake up in an all white room surrounded by computers, and you have to play the game to get out in time. In Missing Anatomy you’re trapped in a doctor’s office after you’re trying to find clues on your long lost brother. Will you get out on time before something sinister happens? And lastly in Framed you are trying to clear your name after being accused of killing your cop friend, will you ever find out who the murderer is before the close runs out? All of the rooms at Riddle Room are 50 minutes in length, and there is a minimum of four people to the room.

Overall Luci’s room is a favourite to players and Jeff and Morgan. Jeff likes Luci’s room because for being a single room people enjoy what Riddle Room has put into the escape to make it immersive and still really cool. He added further, “you can hear the screams coming down the hallways sometimes, so it’s actually a lot of fun.”

Morgan also likes the Missing Anatomy room because it is aesthetically pleasing saying, “these rooms not only are the puzzles really awesome, but they’re also just really pretty.” Both Liu and Cha feel like their rooms need a little bit more, they are looking into set designers to bring their rooms to the next level because they feel like there is always room for improvement. And in this industry, you have to keep updating and keep innovating to stay in the game. She added saying, “no escape rooms are exactly alike because the set dressing’s going to be different, the puzzles are going to be different, and the stories are going to be different.”

These are posters of the escape rooms at Roundabout Canada.

Roundabout Canada’s Social Media Links

Riddle Room’s Social Media Links