CHENNAI: My white prison uniform does nothing to calm my nerves as I stand in the middle of a gloomy prison cell. On the other side of the bars, I catch a glimpse of the police inspector’s desk, it sits unmanned... I turn to back to stare at the small TV in the top corner of the cell, just as the clock starts ticking ominously... 59:59...59:58... For the next 60 minutes, I am prisoner number 410, wrongly convicted of a crime I didnt commit. I quickly glance left at the still unmanned desk, right at the television. Time is ticking away. My fellow handcuffed prisoner and I spring into action.
We find nothing beneath the mattress, nothing under the bed — we run around the room scrambling for hidden clues in vain, till we spot a large clue on the walls, waiting silently to be read. The game had just begun....
Just 30 minutes earlier, I was seated in the brightly lit lounge of Mystery Rooms, Chennai, chatting with Anurag Jangra, the franchisee owner, Chennai branch and Prateek Panjwani, MD and co-founder, Mystery Rooms. “Each mystery is designed to be solved in under 60 minutes, and with a team of two to eight people,” Anurag explains.
Mystery Rooms is Chennai’s latest entry in the adventure entertainment. Started by Shikhir Bhutani, Sapna Bhutani and Prateek Panjwani in 2014, Mystery Rooms debuted in Delhi and has expanded to 15 centres across India.
If you love to play “Escape the room” games on your cell, the real-life version is all the where two-eight people are locked inside a mysterious space for an hour, with the motive of escaping before time runs out.
There are four ‘missions’ in Chennai, and we opt for the easiest — Lockout. “We try to give as real an experience as we can — you have to wear the prison uniform, be handcuffed etc,” explains Prateek, who lent his expertise as an architect to design the rooms. What if we get stuck in the middle... what do we do then? “You get two clue prompts.
If you do a Facebook check-in, you get the third one too!” he says. Gathering my thoughts back to the dingy prison cell, I recall his words. A clue! Yes! I quickly press the buzzer, waiting for the screen to light up and sure enough, the words unravel a lot of our predicament. We find a few scraps of paper to help us decode the riddle, and after several important minutes of trial and error, we are free! Adrenaline pumping, we step out of the cell to find ourselves in the second stage of the game.
“Each game is designed in levels. We pick a theme, do extensive research and after the trial runs, we finalise the game — each game took around seven months to launch,” explains Prateek.
Each mission has its own set of tunnels, clues that require some action, thrill and a whole lot of brain-games to work out. What happens if we don’t finish in 60 minutes? “Each game has its own reaction that is a surprise for now,” Prateek smiles mischievously.
The countdown now reads 0:58, and we are stuck in the fourth and final stage. The ticking gets louder, and my heart beats faster... and still, I’m not able to crack the last and final clue! Suddenly the lights go off and my companion and I huddle together as the red lights come on... we have been caught! And the game ends.
Back in the lounge after we’ve been de-briefed, Prateek says, “We have a success rate of only 20% in the ‘Lockout’ mission!” And we admit that though we lost by just a second, it was great fun to be a prisoner for an hour.
Find Mystery Rooms at No.24, Second Floor, BBCL Magnum, College Road, Nungambakkam, Opp. Metrological Institute. For details call: 9899009341. Open from 11 am to 11 pm on all days.