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| Photo by Benjamin Jet |
It's been my experience that haunt fans usually love escape rooms. Whenever I meet someone new and they learn that I love haunts and Halloween, their next question is usually, "Do you like escape rooms too?" The truth is, I'd never been particularly intrigued by escape rooms. For some reason, I'd always imagined that I would find myself in a boring, sterile room where I would be forced to work out arcane logic puzzles - or, even worse, MATH PROBLEMS - until I either failed to escape or straight up died of boredom. It sounded like a worst case scenario corporate team-building exercise, and why would I put myself through that willingly? Yet when the invitation came to check out The Pyramid, the newest room at Escape Room L.A. downtown, I surprised myself by asking Mr. Spooky if he wanted to check it out with me. Maybe it was the fact that haunt season is officially over and I was hungry for a new immersive experience; maybe it's the fact that 2017 has felt borderline apocalyptic and has led me to take the leap into many new experiences (cutting bangs! my first tattoo! political activism!). In any case, I decided I was up to the challenge of finding the elusive Mask of the Jade Warrior.
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| Photo by Benjamin Jet |
When we arrived, we were organized into a small group of a half-dozen people and ushered into the first room. As soon as we stepped inside, I knew that I had made a terrible mistake - not in accepting this invitation, but in avoiding escape rooms for so long. Spoiler alert: I LOVED IT. The theming, which evokes an ancient Mayan temple hidden deep in the jungle, was impeccable, giving me a chance to indulge all of the Indiana Jones fantasies I didn't even know I had. The puzzles were challenging but not impossible, and certainly not anything that involved sitting down with a piece of paper to work out equations (LOL, what was I thinking?). After we finished the first room, I was shocked - shocked! - and delighted when the wall slid aside, revealing a mysterious passageway. That's when I realized that this wasn't just an escape room, it was actually the first in a series of rooms. We weren't just solving puzzles, we were on an adventure.
