University of Guelph alumni bring the puzzle room trend to their city
You’re locked in a room with a series of confounding puzzles. Perhaps you’re a jewel thief trying to escape before security comes, or you’re hiding from a serial killer, or you’ve been placed in the room by a mysterious genie. Either way, you only have 60 minutes, and no other tools other than your mind.
Can you escape?
That’s the concept behind puzzle rooms, a trend that has been growing in popularity in recent years—especially around the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
“I believe they started in Budapest of all places,” said T. Shawn Johnson. “It took off there because there were little spaces that people could get for next to nothing that would get abandoned.”
Along with Dr. Glenn Roberts, T. Shawn Johnson is the owner of Fantescapes, the first puzzle room to open in Guelph. Both men have strong connections to the University of Guelph: Johnson has a degree from the university in fine art and music, while Roberts is a horticulture professor.
“And they were kind of an outgrowth of the computer game where you’re basically in a room and you have to, you know, put this thing there and that thing there to make this thing open,” Johnson continued. “And it kind of spread to Europe, but then Hong Kong grabbed it and went crazy with it, as you can imagine, and then from Hong Kong it [pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Currently, no one has been able to fully escape…[/pullquote]
went to the U.S., and then from the U.S. to Canada, and it’s really gotten big in Toronto. Like, New York has four or five, San Francisco has three or four…Toronto has 45.”
After trying out one of Toronto’s plentiful puzzle rooms, Johnson and Roberts were disappointed to learn that there was nothing similar in Guelph. So they decided to open one of their own.
“We went and saw something like seventeen different ones in the Toronto and Kitchener areas before we felt comfortable enough to go forth,” said Roberts. “And the nice thing is that Glenn’s family has a retail background. And Glenn is very technical and build-y, and that sort of thing, and I’m more artistic and puzzle-oriented and game-oriented.”
And so Johnson and Roberts combined their talents to create their first puzzle room.
“[The room] is a genie’s lamp, so we’ve created this mythology that you can only, as a mortal, stay within the genie lamp for 60 minutes before you get booted out,” said Johnson. “And so your job is to get as much treasure during that time by solving as many puzzles as you can and freeing the genies during that time.”
“We’re not going to change our first room for a very long time. It might be never. Because we put so much work into the actual décor of the room to make it look themed. But what we’re going to do instead is we’re going to do episode one, episode two, so we can still use the same beautiful room, but instead we’ll change the puzzles and the storyline for why you’re actually entering the genie’s lamp.”
The room is challenging, too. Currently, no one has been able to fully escape, but this high difficulty level was very much intentional.
“In most escape rooms, I think only 10-20 per cent of people actually get out,” said Johnson. “And the reasoning behind that is that for people who are really smart or really experienced, if they get out and they’ve only spent 15 minutes in the room, then they’ll be upset that they spent the money and didn’t get a full hour’s worth of entertainment. But on the other hand, if you went into a room and you were brand new, and you knew that 90 per cent of the people got out of the room and you didn’t, then it would make you kind of sad.”
Currently, Fantescapes has just one room, but Johnson and Roberts have more rooms already in the works. These rooms will include an ever-changing junkshop room, based on Ray’s Disarrays in downtown Guelph, and an alien abduction room.
The owners are planning to bring their escape rooms to the University of Guelph, too; they’ll be building a room specifically for this year’s Gryphcon, a weekend-long gaming convention.
“It’s not going to be uber-themed like the Genie room; it’s going to be a puzzle room,” said Johnson. “And it won’t be as hard. But it’ll still be challenging and fun.”
But it’s not just rooms that Johnson and Robert work on: they also hand-made or hand-picked almost all of the unique decor in Fantescapes. Indeed, the lobby room is filled with atmospheric steampunk-style decorations and paintings and sculptures that are also solvable puzzles. There is also a “Geek Chique [sic] Boutique” that sells everything from steampunk clothing to puppets that sit on one’s shoulder, ideal for cosplaying and role-playing.
“We’ve put a lot of ourselves [into Fantescapes], and we’ve done a lot of crafting to make this happen,” said Johnson. “Like all of this border that you see around the edge of the thing, that was all made by us […] we made the front desk, and all of the furniture in the room is made by us, and all of the puzzles are made by us.”
“We wanted to make it a really magical place.”