"All These People are Dead Now"

Last week we escaped the room.

And here's the squad that did it.

There's an activity here in Jilin that we've done a couple times that's unlike anything I've ever experienced before. "Locked Room," as it's been translated to me, is essentially a place you get trapped inside and have to solve a series of puzzles to escape. In some ways, it's like a giant point-and-click game come to life. There are physical challenges (like throwing balls or grabbing keys), codes based on words, numbers, or characters, and all throughout you constantly need to use your environment to your advantage (like aiming and reflecting laser beams to hit sensors that will unlock a door, or finding a lock combination on a scrap of paper with a UV light).

So far, it's been extremely difficult. The answers often require uncanny creativity, and many times I've been thinking "I never would have thought of that" as we move from room to room. But last week, we did it. The goal is to finish all the puzzles to earn your freedom in under an hour, and we were successful. Full disclosure: a couple of us had already done this room before, but we stayed pretty quiet and quite honestly had forgotten most of the solutions anyways.

To those who escape, the reward is a picture of them on the wall. So now we have the honour of mounted fame, plus we'll be the only foreigners on the wall!

Here's a video from our first attempt at the same room, when we were not as successful...