Escape Rooms (http://roomescapeadventures.com/) are apparently a new gaming trend (at least to us). Two or more people are placed in a themed room and given clues to solve in order to escape within 60 minutes. We’re not sure what happens if you don’t solve it – whether you are never heard from again or maybe some Hunger Games shit happens.
What we find curious is the extent to which elaborate themes have been developed. A few we saw in our search involved werewolves or zombies (of course, because we haven’t beaten those genres to death yet), a moon base, haunted theaters, a bank heist, and an auction house. One has to wonder exactly how exhilarating it is to escape from a Monet sale, but to each his own.
If we’re going to embrace this Escape game paradigm, why don’t we make these scenarios a little bit more adaptable to real life? At least that way there would be some long-term gain after you slap down your $30 to play. So the staff at TND, which largely consists of Cassandra and me and a bottle of Rioja, got right on the task.
Escape from the Front Door When Your Neighbor Drops By to Discuss “An Important Matter for All of Us”: You have 17 minutes to extricate yourself from this conversation and get back to The Voice without revealing what you truly think. You must be vigilant for verbal cues from your neighbor allowing you to express appropriate, yet insincere, empathy while actually saying nothing that the neighbor can quote to their next conversational victim. Bonus points if you can get the neighbor to walk away saying “What a kind and understanding soul [insert your name here] is.”
Escape This
Audience by Derek K. Miller
Escape from Your Child’s 7th Grade Band Recital: The whole school is watching their golden children. You can’t stand another minute of what you were told was an Aaron Copland composition, but sounds like a performance art piece of dying cattle. You can not look disinterested and/or suicidal. No checking your smartphone for ESPN updates or staging an obvious faux coughing fit. You must find the primary conduit for passing information to the earnest parents and plant the seed about a sick relative. Phone on vibrate, look for the proper moment in the performance to look concerned at your phone and swiftly exit the auditorium. If you get out in less than 30 minutes, consider yourself the luckiest person alive.
Escape from the Thanksgiving Table without a Triple Homicide on Your Record: In this scenario you must not only identify what the hell your great aunt is low-talking about (“mumble, mumble, mumble….died of cancer…mumble, mumble”) but also avoid the nettlesome comments of extended family members bent on proving how their wing of the family is superior. Be on your toes when Uncle Preston says “You probably heard that Jamie just graduated cum laude from Princeton. I forget, what was that junior college you attended for a semester?” Navigate the dry overcooked turkey, lumpy mashed potatoes, and inedible jello mold while dropping in a sincere sounding compliment or two and you win!
Escape from the Mall in Under 2 hours without Sobbing and with All Your Christmas Shopping Done: This challenge is a piece of cake for those not giving a fuck about A) other shoppers (just run them down if need be) and B) the specific needs of anyone you pretend to care about. Most men don’t even need 20 minutes to master this task. Extra points if you unintentionally buy your significant other the exact same thing they did not like last Christmas. To the prompt “Do you need a gift receipt?” always respond “Abso-fucking-lutely!” and your path to success is assured.
Escape from the TSA Holding Cell at LaGuardia: If you are a humor blogger your brain’s frontal lobe, where impulse control is born, is severely damaged at best. You therefore could not resist making a “terrorism-Ebola fusion” joke to the stone-faced TSA agent. Nice work. Now you are sitting handcuffed to a table without any money for a decent attorney (because again you are a humor blogger). You must find an escape route by locating the humanity in the TSA supervisor while mustering some sincere humility in yourself. You will likely fail this task.
No need to pay someone else to elude zombies and vampires while pondering the use of brush stroke techniques in a Renoir for terrifying, heart pumping entertainment. Escaping our own lives’ tribulations is thrill ride enough.