Unlocking the Joys of Austin’s Puzzle Rooms

(Page 5 of 7)

Austin Panic Room

The Panic Room is where it all began: "Austin's first and original escape game." When it opened a couple of years back, some friends and I failed to defuse a bomb there, so I figured I was due for a rematch. This time, my partner and I chose Museum Heist from the menu of rooms, and since it can take 10 players, we joined a group of eight newcomers that included a few younger folks.

Situated in an old house near the Austin Community College Rio Grande campus, the Austin Panic Room art heist couldn't have been more different from the one at Escape Game Austin. After waiting in the cramped entryway for a few stragglers to arrive, the facilitator led our party through white-painted hallways to the "art gallery." A brief explanation of the setup and a few awkward get-to-know-you games later, we entered the room.

Unlike other escape games we tried, every element of the puzzles in this one were contained in this one room, with no other areas to open up but the ultimate egress. While an effort was made to create the feel of an exhibition hall or a storage room by filling the space with crates and artwork, the overall impression was that we were still in the room of an old house with assorted paintings, crates, and display cases laid out around it.

My partner and I got down to the business of tearing apart the area for clues, recording and sorting numbers, words, and other potentially useful information as we discovered them, while the rest of our team took a more ... casual approach. This underscored for us the importance of leadership and team spirit in these games; the lack of a shared strategy with which to approach the tasks significantly increased the difficulty of completing them.

The overall design of the structure and flow of the puzzles added more stress. Most of the obstacles were sets of three- or four-digit combination locks or padlocks with keys hidden somewhere in the room. This homogeneity of solutions led to much duplicated and wasted effort, as we had to try every key or number we worked out on all the appropriate locks. Thus, our path through the sequence of clues was broad and disjointed. We were simultaneously faced with too many puzzles to solve and left stymied with no rough edges to pick at when our efforts stalled out.

Progress felt frustrating and aimless, but with liberal use of the hints from our operator (relayed over a static-y walkie-talkie guarded jealously by the youngest of our group), we eventually made a successful escape, posed for our obligatory victory photos, and picked our way out through the congested entrance.