Escape Room #3 - "Matsuri" Opening October 14th!

Hello Again!

It's been a busy couple months but we're excited to finally announce the arrival of our 3rd Escape Room, "Matsuri"!

The village of Matsuri is on the verge of peace. The rival gangs that run the village have decided to end their decades-long-conflict by celebrating with a fireworks festival, and your company, Hanabi, will be providing the fireworks.

However, the grand finale has been stolen by the village thief and taken to their hideout! Luckily everyone knows where that is because that kind of goes with the gig when everyone knows you're the village thief. But without the grand finale, the rival gangs will accuse each other of sabotage and the warring will continue.

You'll have to use your brain and teamwork to solve the traps in the hideout of the thief and recover the fireworks. The village of Matsuri depends on you!

Matsuri opens on October 14th but we will be doing testing throughout October prior to the official release. For those of you who have been in contact with us over the past few months we'll be reaching out and sending you your invitation soon but if you're interested send us an email at info@lockedchicago.com and we'll see if we have any slots available! 

Happy Escaping!

Lock Chicago

Lock Chicago's New Escape Room Location!

Hello Again!

Our team at Lock Chicago is excited to announce we're moving to a brand new location (still in Evanston don't worry!) to 820 Davis Street. This facility will be close to 4,000 square feet and triple the size of our existing space.

This will allow us to add 3 additional escape rooms and enhance our existing rooms even further to provide the best possible experience for our guests. We're delighted to be able to leverage our new innovative technology in our 3rd upcoming room which will launch in July! More details to come in a following post :)

Stay tuned as we will be passing out some hot new deals and promotions on our new room!

Cheers,

Lock Chicago

Lock Chicago Data and Escape Room Statistics

Escape Rooms have been around for over a decade across the world but within the past 3 years have recently begun to gain mainstream popularity across the United States. But are they just a fad or will they follow the same path as Laser Tag or other similar games? We spoke with guests and other escape rooms to pull together some interesting key data pieces about the state of the industry in the United States. Special thanks to King's Escape Room for information from their infographic! 

• From a survey of 1,000 33.9% of respondents said they had never heard of an Escape Room before!
• 100% of respondents ages 18-24 loved their Escape Room experience.
• 50/50 there was no correlation between male/female on opinions of escape rooms.
• 84.9% of those who had visited an Escape Room in the past year "loved" their experience.
• There are over 2,300 escape rooms in the United States compared to 2,200 in Russia where the industry has been thriving.

There is no doubt that this industry will continue to grow at a staggering rate but all things must eventually slow down especially as others look to play in the same space and join the market. It is up to the customer to decide on what makes the most special experience and escape rooms to keep up and continue to provide that experience. 

If you haven't tried an escape room yet what are you waiting for?? 

Cheers,

Lock Chicago

Designing an Escape Room: The Idea

Everything starts with a small idea (or in the case of a Snuggie, someone accidentally putting a bathrobe on backwards) and the Escape Rooms here at Lock Chicago are no different. It all starts off with the most granular element of the puzzle, and the rest develops as you realize what you can accomplish with that mechanic. Take a look at our Sunburn room, for example. The underlying mechanic for the room is "light" and interesting ways to play around with it, especially redirection (if anyone here has seen The Mummy you know what I'm talking about). Every puzzle that exists in that room involves that mechanic.

An Expert Opinion

For those of you who follow this sort of thing, Johnathan Blow is releasing The Witness on January 26th, a puzzle game for computers and consoles. Johnathan Blow is considered one of the greatest video game puzzle makers around, and in this interview he states that the 600+ puzzles that exist to be solved in the game all have, on their most granular level, the same mechanic running through them: connecting two dots with a line.

Connecting the Dots

That's right, the some 100 hours of playtime it would take to fully beat his upcoming game are spent essentially just connecting dots, but once you see the screenshots and videos of the game you can immediately tell that it's a gross over-simplification. The important thing to take away from this is that the entire concept, and the project he and his team have spent close to 10 years now working on, started with an idea as small as connecting two dots with a single line. All great ideas stem from a granular foundation, and that concept has been generalized into the term we know today as "theme". What is the theme of your Escape Room, and how will you abstract it?

Tackling a project can be daunting when you look at it as a whole. When building a house, don't think of the house--think of the foundation you have to lay first, then the wood skeleton, then the insulation, then the exterior, then the interior, and then the finishing touches. Designing (and not to mention building) an Escape Room is done the same way, and that's how we do it at Lock Chicago. If you're looking to get some help starting a room, or are just curious to learn more, feel free to reach out to us at info@lockedchicago.com and we'll give you all of the advice we can.