Escape rooms are all the rage right now. There are locations in Nashua and Manchester, and now Concord is about to get its very own opening Saturday.
Gregory and Bobbi Slossar, co-owners of the new Escape Room Concord, were nice enough to let a team of Insider and Monitor staffers get in before the opening to try it out and see what we thought.
If you don’t know what an escape room is (as I didn’t before this assignment), it’s basically just a room that you have to try to escape from using a series of clues – it’s sort of like the movies National Treasure and Angels and Demons (yes, we know that’s a book, too), only instead of traveling the globe to find clues, you stay in one room.
We assembled a pretty top-notch team of editors/reporters Hannah Sampadian, Sarah Kinney, Nick Stoico and myself, plus Advertising Director Tim Brady and Vice President of NNExt David Sangiorgio (formerly the publisher of the Monitor). Sangiorgio had done some of these before and he recommended a team of about six.
We met the owners in the lobby and were explained the rules of the escape room after signing our lives away on an unsettling waiver (apparently there’s a chance of death or serious bodily injury while doing this?). The main takeaway was don’t physically force anything – certain items will move or open or do certain things, but they should do them with ease, we were told.
Once the rules were fully and clearly explained, we entered The Library, the only room that will be available until the fall, when The Elevator opens. It looked like an old, kind of eerie library complete with bookshelves, a desk, some chairs, some hanging pictures and dim lighting. There was also a soundtrack of stressful music playing lightly in the background – it was reminiscent of what they used on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. On top of the bookshelf was a screen displaying a countdown clock – you get one hour to escape the room.
Once inside, there’s no instruction – it’s up to the team to just start poking around and trying to find clues and figure out what they mean.
At this point it’s worth pointing out that due to the nature of escape rooms, we can’t really get into too many specific details or we’d ruin it for everyone who reads this.
The most important thing was teamwork. We had six people all looking around in different parts of the room, finding different things at different times. When one person found something, they announced that they’d found a clue and we all tried to figure out what it meant. Sangiorgio, our resident escape room pro, decided that we should put all the clues we found on the center desk so as not to lose anything or retrace our steps.
We started off strong, finding lots of clues and making progress within the first 10 or so minutes, but then it started to get more challenging. Lots of clues didn’t make sense until we had found others, and some things weren’t possible until other things were accomplished.
At about the 40-minute mark, we got a second wave of productivity and the spirits in the room started to collectively rise, feeling that we must be almost done. It felt like a crew who’d been working together for years – we all seemed to know exactly what each other was doing and worked together like a well-oiled, room-escaping machine.
In the end, we made it out with a few minutes to spare, and there was a legitimate sense of accomplishment shared by all.
The whole experience was a great team-building exercise, as everyone has different skills in life that were all put to use – at one point Sampadian even used her knowledge of Latin to help decipher a clue.
The place will likely be pretty popular after this article reaches the masses (we’re a pretty big deal), so go to EscapeRoomConcordNH.com or call 225-2271 to book a spot now.
