By Manon, Strasbourg, France
For Christmas 2022, I received a gift card to do an escape game. It was a gift from my godmother. Originally, this gift was from me, my boyfriend, my brother, and his girlfriend. Meanwhile, one year passed and my boyfriend went to Australia so, we needed someone to take his place. Finally, we suggested to our parents and the parents of my brother’s girlfriend. At the beginning, we were four, and at the end, we were seven (more people, more fun).
You are locked in a room for 1 hour and the aim is to escape it. For this, you need to solve a lot of riddles. Usually, an escape game is played in teams because you need different intelligence. Indeed, we have logical riddles, word games, visual riddles and more so, it’s important to have different brains and different points of view.
As money was the best thing in the world (after love (yeah, I’m a romantic person), friendship and health of course), we chose bank hold-up. 💰 When we arrived, a man was waiting for us. He explained to us the game’s rules and our task (this man was our god during the part because he helped us when we were stuck on clues).
Fun fact: He told us “It is forbidden to do a murder” and believe me, during the game, I understood why he told this. Seriously, this game can break up friendships or cause problems if you’re a bad player 😂
In the bank, 7 gold bars were hidden in safe boxes. Each person had a flashlight and a dark jacket. Two people had a walkie-talkie, and one person of the group had a bag in which she put every object we touched (we shouldn’t leave our footprint) and to put stolen gold bars. One detail was very important: during the game, we had to find a code to get out at the end. If we didn’t find this code, the game was over. We had one hour to do this.
At the beginning of the part, the group was divided into two groups. One group in the sewers and the other one in the bank. I’m a brave person so, I was in sewers with men (of course, I was here to increase the level, women are stronger and smarter than men 😉). We didn’t have clues and we needed to search for them in the room. We were in the darkness so, the first step was to turn on the lights (SPOILER: we failed this step, so we did the whole game in the darkness…). We solved a lot of riddles like puzzles to find a code locker, find different objects, etc. Thanks to our walkie-talkie, we communicated with the bank’s team. For their part, they started the hold-up. After 25 minutes, we managed to join the team and the best part started.
Once in the bank, the aim is to find the codes of the safe boxes. The difficulty was some safe boxes were empty. For this, we had to search everywhere in the room like behind paintings, below table and stairs, in the drawers and more so, you will understand, it’s a big mess.
After solving a lot of riddles, we only had 15 minutes to unlock the safe boxes. For this, we had a notebook with bank information’s customers and videos from surveillance cameras of the safe room. For example, one of the customers used to come at 5pm each Saturday so we watched the video and we found in which safe box he put his gold bar. On the video, we could see a paper in his hand with the code of his safe box. Thanks to this, we opened the safe box and stole the gold bar. We did the same thing for each of them, but the riddles were a little different for each customer. Sometimes, we had information about their safe boxes but not about them and other times, the opposite. The code was not always noted on a paper, and we needed to find it with a riddle.
When we only had 4 minutes left, we decided to stop our hold-up and to get out. Let me reassure you, we failed the lights step but we found the final code to get out. 💪
Result: We stole 4 gold bars out of 7 so, it was a good first hold-up. 😉
So, if you’ve never done an escape game, I hope I’ve inspired you to try it! ☺️
If you’ve already done an escape game, tell me your best fact during the game!!!