Escape Review: Exit Game, Lab 51

Just finished playing the room Lab 51 at Exit Game in Monterey Park, Los Angeles and it was excellent! This was the biggest 'room' I've ever played in, branching out into near eight or even nine rooms depending how you divide them. This was also the smallest group I've ever done a Real Escape Game with. We did this one with only a team of four people, and while we missed the hour mark by going over a few minutes, we solved all of the challenges and made it out.

The challenges were complex and kept us on our toes, having to think outside of the box as well as keeping track of already solved challenges. In this room, the path was linear but constantly doubling back on itself, or leaving us with partially unsolved challenges and clues. Despite the low number of people, the team worked amazingly well, we were all engaged and constantly brainstorming and turning our clues over. We were vocal as a group, announcing what we've found and mulling over places we would get stuck. The Exit Game hint system works such that if you only take 1 hint, you can make their leader board, but you get a hint every 10 minutes, so we should have used more hints than we did, after taking our second. We didn't use our pen and paper as much as we thought we would, as most of the puzzle were doable in one's head and the challenges took a fairly straigh forward path. Ultimately, I think what hung us up was our own suspicion and over examination of the surroundings, thinking there was some hidden clues where there wasn't any.

I really enjoyed the setting of Lab 51, from army crawling through tight raised ducts and spaces to rooms filled with alien autopsies and elaborate apparatus. My favorite room looked like a safety deposit box room which led into an even creepier doctors office room, both pitch black. One unique component to this game is we were all given personal flash lights (disguised like fake guns) and helmets for the crawl spaces. After getting through the first room the game became surprisingly dark and ill lit, so the personal flash lights really came in handy, I even ended up carrying around two (and later, a discovered black-light (in the future, bringing our own black-light could save us tons of time!)), and I would often prop a light up in places as we would look at challenges. In the end, I was pretty surprised that the entire challenge ended up being so big and expansive, as I remember thinking how small the first room was. The entire thing was wonderfully constructed and decorated, again this was one of the most elaborate escape game rooms I've been in.

This game was also interesting because we weren't allowed to bring phones in, and further we were scanned with a metal detector before to make sure weren't sneaking anything in. Despite the metal detector, we were able to sneak some lock picks in and the rules said nothing about non-destructive circumvention of the locks. This is an approach I've wanted to take to real escape games for awhile, reminding me of the Black Bag Challenge at Defcon, where escaping the room involves a combination of lock picking and computer based skills. Similarly, I'de really like to play a real life escape game with one or two members of the team being skilled at lock picking, to see if we can't circumvent large portions of the game that the game masters had not intended. All that said, due to the linear nature of this game we were unable to bypass any specific lock before we solved the challenge as intended. This is a strategy I will be attempting more in the future, so stay tuned for that!

Overall, Exit Game was a amazing! Further, while we were there I saw an engineer working on a number of Raspberry Pi systems for electronic elements of a new room they are working on. When you see people building cool tech and applying it to fun and educational events, you just know it's going to be a good time!