This is an escape room: an immersive puzzle-solving experience that will test your mental skills and problem-solving abilities, and for everyone’s delight, it is being offered in English and Chinese.
An escape room is basically a real-life version of a “video game” where you are trapped in a room along with some other participants and must explore your surroundings until you find the key to escape within a certain time limit. Some escape rooms are purely problem-solving, while others have a story with an immersive atmosphere to drive the participants’ actions.
In recent years, Escape Rooms have become very popular. Since the first realizations of the game that began around the year 2000, the number of fixed escape rooms has grown to approximately 3,000 occurring globally, with the number of participants around 1.6 million.
Escape Room in Asakusa
In Japan, the SCRAP corporation is a pioneer in the genre and has a lot of popularity among Japanese puzzle fans. In addition to offering various scenarios for their escape rooms, they also host large-scale special events. For example, they have held a escape event at the Tokyo Dome.
Since 2015, SCRAP has started offering two of its most popular escape rooms, Escape from the Red Room and Escape from the Haunted Manor, both have English and Chinese versions at the Real Escape Room Asakusa. Both cost ¥ 1,800 in advance and ¥ 2,300 at the door.
The Escape from the Red Room seems extremely simple, but it is not. Six participants are locked in a room painted entirely red, with nothing but two locked doors. They have 30 minutes to figure out the code that will unlock the exit, something that only about 3% of groups manage to do. Fortunately, participants can get a 10-minute extension for an additional ¥ 800, but even so, the success rate is about 15%.
The Escape from the Haunted Manor has a somewhat scary story as it concerns a murdered child and strange disappearances that horror fans will love. The gameplay is more involved than the Escape from the Red Room, combining elements of haunted house, treasure hunt, and problem-solving, along with low lights and eerie music to distract and scare. The cost and time rules are the same as Red Room.
Other Escape Rooms
For the third consecutive year, SCRAP is also collaborating with the Tokyo Metro to offer The Underground Mysteries, a problem-solving game that takes you around the Tokyo subway system to find clues. If you can complete all the puzzles, you can enter the final answer on the SCRAP website to complete the game. Since 2015, this game has started to be offered in English and Chinese.
Unlike the traditional format of Escape Rooms, The Underground Mysteries allows you to solve the puzzle at your own pace. In addition to the game materials, it includes a whole day with the Tokyo Metro open only for the event, so participants can move freely between the stations and it takes about four hours to complete the game. One of the cool things about the game is that participants can access places they normally wouldn’t be able to visit.
With multiple languages and a variety of different games now available, there is nothing stopping you from pitting your brain against SCRAP’s puzzle masters if you are in Japan, except perhaps a bit of claustrophobia. But even so, you won’t feel like the walls are starting to close in on you. Unless, of course, they really are closing in…
There is also an Escape Room in Brazil in the city of São Paulo. To finish, we will leave some links that may help you learn more about an Escape Room.
- Official SCRAP Website
- Official Tokyo Website
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