Great Escape
Can the Escape Room Craze Reach Escape Velocity?
Mom-and-pops are struggling in a saturated industry
Breakout City is on edge. A serial kidnapper is terrorizing the town, snatching my neighbors from the airport, the park, and the mall. He’s taken four so far, and my partner and I are determined to prevent a fifth, so we track the sadistic bastard to a seedy roadside motel. But somehow he knew we were coming, and the next thing we know, we’re trapped in a windowless room with an hour to escape.
The madman likes to play games. He has placed clues that could help us escape inside locked drawers and scrawled on notepads; he even hid one on the label of an empty shampoo bottle. In his gravelly voice, he issues a warning through the walls and initiates a countdown. We’re less worried now about saving his victims than becoming them.
We pull back sheets, throw open cabinets, and yank magnetized posts off a bed frame. Five padlocks clearly need to be opened, but how? And what do those faded markings on the wall mean? Desperate, I crane my neck toward the ceiling and ask for a clue.
A few rooms away, an employee of Breakout Louisville is watching our every move. She suggests we look at the sides of those bedposts, where we find a number that unlocks our first…
