This week's Riverfront Times cover story delves into St. Louis' first "Real Escape Room," an attraction that places a team of wannabe Houdinis in a locked room -- with an hour to escape.
The first of these locked room experiences popped up in Japan in 2007. Here in St. Louis, a bio-medical engineer at Philips named Nir Chezrony concocted the fiendish puzzles of Trapped: A St. Louis Room Escape: Volume 2 and enlisted the help two fellow engineers and a high school English teacher to bring his vision to life.
Chezrony, the puzzlemaster, welcomed Riverfront Times behind the curtain of his second run of Trapped, which wrapped up last week. We followed more than twenty teams into a rented room in the Central West End, and there we watched them fail. A lot.
Who managed to escape? How did they solve Chezrony's puzzles? And why would any sane person volunteer to get locked in a room with strangers? Those questions answered, and much more, in this week's feature story.
Read the full story -- Panic Room: A diabolical Japanese puzzle game comes to St. Louis
Follow Danny Wicentowski on Twitter at @D_Towski. E-mail the author at [email protected]
