The coming of autumn brings with it promises of nighttime adventures and opportunities for some quality screams.Thrill seekers everywhere have a cause for excitement. All your favorite haunted attractions use this time to prep for the upcoming season, and perhaps get ready to unveil some new thrills. As you prepare for this Halloween season, remember that haunted houses, prisons, hayrides, and cornfields aren’t the only attractions that deserve your attention. If you have yet to experience the thrilling adventure of escape rooms, you’re missing out on an exciting new trend in the world of Halloween thrill-seeking.
Escape Rooms Make the Experience Tangible
Unlike other haunted attractions, escape rooms allow you to employ your sense of touch. In haunted houses, you can see and hear, but you’re often not allowed to touch anything. On haunted hayrides, the actors jump and climb on the carts, but you can’t touch them and the sets are a good distance away.
Escape rooms are unique in that you can interact with everything in the room. You’re meant to touch the objects, move them around, and hold them for closer observation. By employing your tactile senses, the experience becomes more real in your mind. Often, our sense of touch is the deciding factor in separating something fake from something real in our mind.
Ever heard of the old trick that if you can’t tell whether you’re in a dream or not, try to turn a light switch? You know you’re dreaming when you can’t touch the world around you. Tactile interaction connects the body’s experience to the brain, making the experience real.
By interacting with the room, and having the room interact with you, escape rooms make themselves real in your mind and thus create a more exciting and fully engulfing experience.
Break from the Norm
Escape rooms are a refreshing change from the typical “follow the path” nature of most other haunted attractions like houses, prisons, and hayrides. Though they may seem chaotic at the time you go through them, places like these are designed with a specific layout that is often quite linear. You wander through it with your friends and you feel autonomous, but the path you follow is already carefully predetermined.
You may think that you only ended up in the library of the haunted mansion because the deranged butler with a butcher knife chased you out of the servant’s kitchen. However, you’re really there because that’s the next staged scene, and the deranged butler was not only a catalyst but also a guide of sorts. The hand that jumped out of the picture frame in the hallway was not only a method to scare you, but also something to stop you from making the wrong turn.
Escape rooms are innately different. Though there’s a general pattern to follow, there’s no way to determine which clue will be discovered first, or which course of action the group will decide to take based on those discoveries. They don’t function linearly, and therefore the experience is more authentic.
In addition, escape rooms demand that their victims be engaged mentally. You must do more than stay in line and follow the queue. Escape rooms require you to keep your wits about you – to keep your brain functioning in a state of anxiety.
Escape Rooms Provide Safe, Controlled Fear
Despite the fact that the experience is tangible and more real, the danger is no more present than in any other haunted attraction.
Far from walking through shadowy corridors all alone, escape rooms are a community experience. You’re in a room with a group of people, your family or friends, at all times. Just like with every other haunted attraction, you can feel comforted in the knowledge that everything taking place in the room is an elaborate show meant to induce fear, yes, but also meant to entertain.
The goal with all escape rooms is just that, to escape. You must recognize the clues for what they are, and solve the mystery in order to leave. That being said, escape rooms have a time cap. If you can’t solve the puzzle within a certain amount of time, the game ends. Thus, you can feel safe in the knowledge that you’re not really trapped forever. Though, those with a competitive nature will still want to solve the puzzle and escape under their own power.
Give yourself the ultimate adrenaline rush, while also exercising your brain. Come see what the 13th Hour Haunted House & Escape Rooms has to offer. Test your cunning and your daring in our very own escape rooms. We’re opening for the 2016 season on September 23rd. Check out our pricing and order your tickets online today!