Some, like the St Petersburg-based iLocked, have every candidate play the quest as part of their interview, and those who fail are much less likely to get the job. When these companies hire, they look particularly for young creatives. The general structure is similar: a team of writers comes up with scripts and puzzles that are then realized by designers and builders. There’s also Unconscious where a surreal room represents the mind of a professor who has lost his memory, or the self-explanatory horror of Cirque Du Satan, creepy clowns galore.įrom a business point of view, the quest industry is extremely young, and most companies make the rules up as they go. Or, if you’re a quest connoisseur and a simple evil vampire scenario just doesn’t excite you anymore, you might be interested in Buried Alive where you have to get out of a locked coffin, with the option of a single or a king-sized one if you wish to share your claustrophobia attack with a friend.
Together they offer nearly a hundred different scenarios of various difficulty levels, from the typical zombie apocalypse and prison break types, to ones based on films and TV shows ( True Detective, Boardwalk Empire and Twin Peaks), and highly localised plots that build on the county’s history and culture. But they’ve mostly remained underground except in Russia where the quest industry has become mainstream, becoming a popular choice for teenage birthdays, and with many adults preferring it to clubbing.Ī quick search on Yandex, the popular Russian search engine, returns over 20 St Petersburg-based companies that entertain people by locking them in various spaces. By 2010 these games had spread all over the word.
It inspired many others, mainly in Asia countries including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.
The first offline “room” is said to have appeared in Silicon Valley in 2006. You are also given a walkie-talkie and can ask your quest administrator for for hints and tips.
In real-life quests you have 60 minutes to escape and must physically utilise the objects around you – a key to a desk drawer might be attached to an inconspicuous stuffed toy, and a code to a lock might be written on the inner side of the desk drawer. They were initially inspired by video games, where you would have to find your way out of the locked room by looking for clues and solving puzzles. Room escape games like this one have grown incredibly popular in Russia over the last year. What started out as an investigation of Radchenko’s disappearance turned into a mission to save Leningrad. Near the end of the quest, we were in for quite a plot twist, which revealed that Radchenko blew up the Chernobyl plant on purpose, and had planned another explosion for the Leningrad nuclear station - a detailed letter we’d found in the lab explained the rogue professor’s motives. The scenario was staged around the persona of a fictional professor Igor Radchenko, a worker at the Chernobyl plant who mysteriously disappeared just days before the disaster in April 1986.
Instead, we played a real-life room escape game called The Mystery of Chernobyl, situated in a basement in a dusty residential yard in the centre of St Petersburg. It won’t be a revelation to say we didn’t disarm any live bombs. Then we get our coats, pat ourselves on the back and go for frappuccinos. Inside the lab we hastily disarm a bomb and prevent a nuclear disaster. But as the ball falls into the hole and key falls out, we find out that the door we have been trying to open is fake, and the entrance to the lab is through the secret door in the back the wardrobe. Fast forward five minutes and me and my friend are trying to guide a little metal ball through a pinball-style maze as another friend behind us is frantically peddling an old exercise bicycle to reveal next puzzle. We translate them into Latin numbers and use the code to open a combination door lock. My friend is standing inside a shabby Soviet wardrobe, turning the rail like a screw to lift the shutter, while another of my friends is writing down the Roman numerals that light up when I press the button. “No, don’t stop, it’s gonna crush my fingers!” I shriek at a friend as I try to push a button hidden in the wall as a black shutter slowly lowers, inches from my hand.