Being locked in a room never sounds terribly fun. Let alone paying for the privilege. Despite this, there’s currently a huge spate of experiences designed to test your ability to find keys hidden in some skeleton’s chest cavity: escape rooms.
The only times I can remember being locked in a room occurred when I was young, and my dad put a bolt on the top of the door of my room when I flat-out refused to stay in there when I was being punished. It feels odd to think of locking a kid in a room now; it seems like a different time, or a horror movie plot device. We’ve moved on from smacking, and parents don’t even bother to cook Brussels sprouts any more, perhaps because the only way you can get adults to contemplate putting them in their mouths is if there is almost as much thick cut bacon as there is, er, Brussels. Or if they’re those chocolate ones they sometimes have at M&S cash registers over Xmas.
I digress.
I’m not sure how all this escaping came about. I do remember there being an upsurge in escape room adventures on the app store, I guess because making a ‘refreshed’ version of a point-and-click adventure game is kinda cheap and easy to do. And yet, oddly, people were still fascinated. Is it our James Bond delusion? You know, the one where you weirdly think that, with zero training or real life experience, in a Bond-type situation you would just karate-chop smooth-talk your way to mixing a martini whilst hanging out of a helicopter as things explode beneath you? Or is that just me?