As avid fan members of the cynical elite in Delhi, we heard of a real-life escape game and decided to go as a seven-member strong crew. The jury is out on why we decided to go, part review purposes, part curiosity, and part the age-old ‘will Delhi deliver’.
This is how it works. Ctrl. Shift. Esc is a real escape game, run from what we can only imagine was designed to be an apartment/office space in HKV. They have two games on offer, The Safe House and Quarantine. The premise is simple- you’re given a mission, locked in a room filled with clues, complete with a 60-minute timer, rigged with cameras and mics and you are to find your way out. Seven of us entered The Safe House, after a quick mission and rule briefing, highly self-assured. Ten minutes into our prescribed 60 minutes, and we were given our first clue. Our first guess is, we looked completely lost on camera. Not a first. We’re used to couching behind the comfort of a website.
Binary codes, one too many locks, puzzles to crack, clues to piece together and premises to search; we can’t remember the last time an activity made the time fly by like this game did. We cracked it in under 60 mins, with four clues. The only drawback? The narrative wasn’t on point. If we were to get technical, there were many a loophole, but this is all in retrospect. Be patient while attempting to crack the various codes, it takes a few before you realize what you’re supposed to be looking for. The game makers have painstakingly curated the game, paid attention to detail, gone the extra mile in making it seem as legit as possible. To the point, a colleague was afraid to leave another alone in one of the rooms, and that just goes to show the fear and anxiety the game definitely managed to create (in an adrenaline-pumping kind of way).
Expect to put together everything you’ve ever seen in any adventure thriller to the test, definitely attempt to go beyond the given, and we’d recommend restricting the group you go with to 5 people, or you end up having skewed focus. LBB highly recommends, for a super-fun, innovative and interesting activity in the city.
PS: You can’t play the same game twice, and so far they only have two games running. So if you’ve been there, done that, you’re fresh out of luck.
