Social experiment: Escape Rooms Sarasota

When a mouse finds its way out of the maze, there’s a piece of cheese at the end of the experiment.

When you and your closest friends find your way out of Escape Room Sarasota, you get a T-shirt. Simple enough.

But the puzzles and clues Escape Room participants discover during the 60 minutes they have to escape from the locked  rooms aren’t so simple.

Escape Room Sarasota owners Luis Montanez and Jennifer Seavey were first introduced to escape rooms as players themselves in the Tampa area.

When they opened Escape Room at 6526 S. Tamiami Trail in March, they found there was no manual for setting up the puzzles or determining themes for the rooms. 

Montanez and Seavey set the difficulty level of the puzzles, striking a balance between challenging and escapable. The first of two rooms is the Cabin in the Woods scenario, where Montanez leads participants down a dark hallway to a room that resembles an abandoned cabin. As players make their way down the hall, Montanez can see their body language change from excited to intimidated.

“They come in and look around, and they notice it’s very creepy,” Seavey said. “As soon as the door closes, they’re on their own.”

Players have been known to tug on the closed door out of panic. Eventually, the owners removed the handle from the inside to eliminate the temptation.
 

Once players are in the room, the real fun begins — for both parties. While players are locked into the four-wall room, Montanez and Seavey watch from a control room, giving clues and monitoring safety.

“We can tell if they’re going to escape,” Seavey said.

Inside each room is a TV screen where clues can be displayed to help players along. When players are ready for a clue, they flip a light switch to signal the control room, which cues the person in the control room to display a hint on the screen.

Through the cameras mounted in the rooms, Seavey and Montanez have witnessed great teamwork — along with total breakdowns in communication.

In one group of more than 10, most players spent most of their time trying to pick the lock; meanwhile, just a few focused on solving the puzzles.
 

In a group of co-workers taking part in a team-building activity, one person emerged as the leader — then wouldn’t allow the rest of the team to give input. That team barely escaped with seconds left.

“You see people’s true character when they come in here,” Montanez said. “Once they get in here, as soon as it starts, you can tell who’s the one that is going to be taking charge, because they show it right away.”

When a player who takes control immediately, Seavey and Montanez refer to him or her as the “dictator.” The success rate of groups with a dictator is low in the escape rooms.

Often, while adults overthink a puzzle, the young children in the room are the first ones to solve it.

“We can see them working it out and know, ‘Nope, that’s not it.’ The answer is right there in front of you,” Seavey said. “Of course we know the answer — we say to each other all the time when we’re in the control room, ‘They don’t know that.’”