For Rachel's tenth birthday party, on Sunday, Nicole and I joined Rachel and eight of her fourth grade friends in Operation Rescue, a puzzle room at Time Escape.
We escaped in time to make our reservation a block away at Bambino's for pizza dinner. Paola and Abhinav met us there with the rest of our kids. We had pizza, red velvet cupcakes that Nicole made, and the restaurant fed the kids complimentary tiramisu. Rachel opened her gifts in the time that remained before parents arrived.
The puzzle room was an adventure. The girls were very excited, and anxious, going in. Then a surprise prop in one of the cabinets we opened caused a fright, for Rachel especially. She and a few of her friends had a hard time for a while after that, but together we completed the rest of the puzzles and unlocked the final key to escape from the room with a couple minutes to spare.
Despite the mixed feelings inside the room, once outside everyone seemed upbeat, possibly fueled by relief. I would not be surprised if they all wanted to do it again next year.
Monday morning, Rachel observed to me that the room itself had not been especially scary, but that her mind had expected it to be scarier, and so it was. This seems like a useful idea to understand, and it might help moving forward, but for now she's not ready to sleep alone, yet.
Tuesday, June 5, 2018
There's no escaping imagination
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4 comments:
Kudos to Roy for navigating that many females!
She doesn't want to sleep alone? I thought she wanted her own room. I'm confused.
Glad Rachel has a lively imagination! Scary sometimes, but basically a great life resource I think.
I think you need to provide more information about the theme inside the escape room and the nature of the scary material . . .
I was trying to leave that to your imagination. Either that or reluctant to reveal puzzle room secrets.
Operation Rescue was framed as rescuing a "friend" from the warehouse of some evil person, in the 45 minutes before an explosive device detonated.
The room itself was pretty benign, although it was somewhat dark in there, and we had to use flashlights to look closely at things. But there had been a video playing in the lobby that added some apprehension for the kids. It was a pretty minimal puzzle room setup. There were a few items of furniture, many visibly locked, a few things hanging on the walls, some of which also had locks on them, and a wall of license plates.
During the course of the puzzle, there was a video that played in the room itself via a projector that showed our "friend" bound to a chair in a different room. We had to open a poorly-disguised bookcase/door to get into the room to find our "friend", but when we did, we found a rather different representation. The video used a live actor, I think, but the room contained a happy looking blonde mannequin with a sleep mask poised on her forehead.
Unfortunately, by that time the kids were already spooked, because when we opened one of the locked cabinets in the course of the puzzle, there was a severed arm with a bloody stump. It was a Halloween prop made of rubber, and not very realistic, but it was a surprise, and I think it encouraged Rachel's imagination.
The arm was there to hold a ring on one of its fingers. The ring contained clues for some other locks. But otherwise it was a non sequitur. It's not clear whether it was meant to be seen as a prop or, like the mannequin, as a representation of a real arm, but there was nothing in the framing of the puzzle that made us think anyone had been dismembered. So we were left shaking our heads a bit. Without that gratuitous creepiness, Rachel probably would have enjoyed the experience a lot more.
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