Graywolf Lab

Time travel is a common theme of escape rooms. This one has the conceit of a time-traveling scientist gone missing. There are references to Edison and Houdini, e=mc2 scrawled on a blackboard. 
	A clock, mounted in the corner, counts the seconds down. We have an hour to get out. 
	Quickly we search the room. What are we looking for? Perhaps it’s a code or a cog or a magnet or a key; it might involve mirrors or dice or playing cards, and the trick is sequencing or matching or reflecting or decoding. Laney, my niece, eight years old, is impatient. She wants to see everything, and she gets in the way.
	Finally: a long, wordy clue. We let her read, but she’s achingly slow, and the clock is ticking. There is something affecting about her costume white coat––we all wear one, but hers swamps her––less a scientist, more a ghost. She ekes the words out as the pressure builds.

*

This escape room is at Center Parcs, a European chain of holiday villages, all set in forests. My extended family is on its first vacation in four years. My husband and I have come with our six-month-old baby to join my sister and her kids, my mum and dad. We all lodge together in a small cabin in the woods, which feels increasingly small as the week goes on. Perhaps it makes a perverse sense to take ourselves off to an even smaller set of rooms, in a different patch of woods, and challenge ourselves to break out.

*

When I first told my mum about the concept of an escape room, she said, Oh no. She said, I don’t think I’d like that. 
	The escape room is not only about paying someone to lock you in. It’s also about paying someone to limit your time. 
	In his Introductory Lectures, Freud describes how an educated ego becomes “reasonable”: “It is no longer controlled by the principle of pleasure, but by the principle of fact, which at bottom also aims at pleasure, but pleasure which is postponed and lessened by considerations of fact.” As a civilised people, we accept limits. Perhaps even prefer them? Psychologically, it feels nice. To save and to get. To wait and to splurge.

*

A woman wakes in a locked room, with only a piece of wood. How does she get out?

The progenitor of the escape room, the locked-room mystery, can be found in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, both of whom my sister binged on as a pre-teen. 
	I remember listening to them on audiobook on a family holiday in Amalfi, nauseated as the car climbed the twisty mountain. I must have been six or seven at the time, and my sister—three years older—had vouched for their suitability, but I was possibly too young: I have a vivid imagination, and for years after would fear drinking from a water glass that had sat out, sensing the whiff of cyanide in the air.
	As teenagers in the 1990s my sister and I became obsessed with a video game, a post–nuclear-fallout San Francisco neo-noir featuring a laconic detective called Tex Murphy. Technically “interactive movies,” they would absorb us for hours in my father’s study, the flow frustrated only by the periodic need—click, whizz, whirr—to insert a new CD-ROM into the computer tower. Although the games weren’t purely locked rooms, they rewarded the same kind of exploration.
	In the UK, that same decade, locked-room mysteries returned to a mainstream audience in Jonathan Creek, broadcast on the BBC. I remember a person dead in a bunker, behind a bricked-up wall, and the giveaway being the piping for the toilet. (Has a national broadcaster derived such heady water cooler chat from irregular plumbing since?) 
	The internet dates the first physical escape room to Kyoto in 2007. They spread to Europe in the early-to-mid 2010s, riding the same wave of post-digital hunger for physical interaction as immersive theatre companies like Punchdrunk and Secret Cinema. 
	Come to think of it, throughout my childhood, during weekend lunches with my father, I received training in the kind of puzzling that would eventually be tested in escape rooms. One Saturday, my sister brought home a riddle from school about a cabbage, a wolf, and a sheep. After that lateral thinking puzzles––some involving locked rooms––accompanied every baked fish and crumble. But even before the puzzles at the dinner table, I remember my father, beneath the twinkling chandelier, asking questions and always expecting me to have the answer. I found this terrifying, as if we had to know what was in his mind. By comparison, the puzzles—the man who can ride the elevator higher in the rain, or Romeo and Juliet, wet and covered in glass, gasping for air—were a relief.

She rubs her hands together until they’re sore, uses the saw to cut the wood in half, two halves make a whole, jumps through the hole . . .

*

Yesterday, before the escape room, we took Laney on a “high ropes” course. A floor of safety bark beneath towering structures of wood, cord and steel. 
While she climbed, my husband and I were bound with rope, and challenged to free ourselves. Matt tussled against the knots, turning pink.   
	This is stupid, he said.
	But I wanted to crack it. It annoyed me how annoyed he was getting. 
	It was the same with our baby’s nighttime wakeups. I wanted to solve them, to nail this loving act, this giving over of ourselves to a new person. Matt seemed affronted that there was even something to crack. 
	We had this person, tying us together. Whether we liked it or not. I’d recently injured my wrist, weakened by hormones, and could no longer bend to scoop our baby from the crib. Matt had to wake in the night to help me. Jagged words. I sometimes worried it was all a big mistake.
	And now we were here, bound by rope, the forced teamship revealing the way we were imperfectly linked. 
	You’re ridiculous, I said.
	Matt struggled with the binds, attempting a new approach, a carefree bluster . . . 
	He’s trolling us, he said, of the group leader.
	Eventually the leader took pity on us, revealing the trick—something about pulling together.

*

I’d come to Center Parcs with the sense that it was an artificial kind of place, and that its artificiality would prevent it from generating any real or profound experience. But was this true? And if so, where did the artificiality lie? 
        When I thought of Center Parcs as a child, I imagined it took place inside a giant plastic dome. I pictured smiling children helmeted and hair in ponytails, cycling around under glass shells, like bugs under bowls. In fact, there are only two main covered areas: the swimming pool––the dome––known locally as the “subtropical swimming paradise,” and a sports plaza––or “Jardin des Sports”: a nod to the chain’s European heritage. 
        And the dome remains present in so much Center Parcs’s marketing, protecting not only the guests from intemperate weather, but also the Parcs’s profits: “The weather could impact our business. . . . However, there is a wide mixture of indoor and outdoor activities to mitigate this risk and our systems encourage advance bookings, which is not weather dependant.”
        The encouragement to pre-book is itself artificial, and frustrates spontaneity, causing Center Parcs to compare unfavourably, in Laney’s mind, to her favourite holiday resort, Butlins. It’s true that this system requires a degree of self-knowledge that might be too much to expect from a child of eight. You have to know exactly what is likely to make you happy in the future. You must know who you’re going to be tomorrow, and the day after that. It is a level of self-foreknowledge that even I, in my thirties, sometimes lack.

*

Now that I’m older and a parent myself, I understand that lateral thinking puzzles were my father’s way of engaging us without condescending. While powers of logic develop with maturity, lateral thinking is more egalitarian. The answers—“a dwarf with an umbrella” or “Romeo and Juliet were fish”—are equally available to children as adults, and might even appear more obvious to children who every day ask questions like, “Do crabs cry?”
        My father liked to enhance the complexity by building out a taxonomy of puzzles: changed states, redundant details, false assumptions. The false assumptions were my favourite, and taught me the superpower of being a child. Of course adults take things for granted; of course if you tell them the streetlamps are on, they are going to assume it’s night.

*

There is a moment when Laney panics: a wardrobe comes unlocked, revealing a surprise second room, and she looks shocked, as though she’s just been capsized. Everything she thought solid suddenly loose.

*

By the time we go to Center Parcs, I have been to many escape rooms, including on my hen do. I even made one for guests the night before my wedding. 
	Perhaps I wanted to reflect the way a contract, a trap, a bind, can also contain possibilities, surprises, new rooms. Or the fact the nuclear family involves puzzles: If childcare costs x and work pays y, how fulfilling must it be to keep doing? If one of you works full time and the other is so tired they worry about dropping the baby, who should wake in the night when the baby cries?
	When I told my dad I was getting married, he expressed surprise, not about my choice of partner, but that I was doing it at all. But wasn’t it the destiny of my “educated ego” to choose the restrictions of socially recognised monogamy for the benefits of delayed, assured gratifications: a home, a husband, family? 
	It begins to dawn on me: what if I chose the locked box of marriage and motherhood because I wanted to prove I was smart enough to subvert it? For the wedding, I considered reading from Arlie Russell Hochschild, about how a bride who is not happy enough on her wedding day can is experiencing an “inappropriate affect.” At university, I had thrilled to the ideas of Marcuse, who argued that the ideas of scarcity on which Freud’s reality principle depends were artificial; the principle was outdated.
	Maybe I thought that, with my background in locked rooms and lateral thinking, I could game the family. I could escape. 

*

I rarely feel as free as I do in an escape room. It’s not dissimilar, I suppose, to the freedom I once felt in the office, given specific tasks and deadlines and driven by the hunger to prove myself, the junior employee’s quotidian state of emergency.
	I wonder if the proliferation of escape rooms—almost 2000 in the UK at the beginning of 2025, according to escapethereview.net—speaks to a leakage of the office mentality beyond office hours. Conversely, escape rooms are often booked for corporate away days and during the hiring process. I think it does matter that you’re utilising skills valued in the workplace—team building and problem-solving and “effective time management.” It also matters who you are using them with. These are bonding exercises, and as you toggle the dials of a combination lock, fingers shaking with adrenaline, or as your mum nails a puzzle, grinning with vindication, or as your niece screws up her hands and hops from one foot to another, or as you break out of one reality and find yourself in another kind of trap, you’re going through something, together.

*

What happens after the puzzle is solved? When you leave the stylized room—a prison, a chaotic office—and re-enter the world? A moment of deflation. A sadness, or frustration, sometimes, at the silliness off the solution, like after the reveal in a Jonathan Creek mystery. There is something too pat, too gimmicky, too impossible to guess about the answer that feels like you’ve been tricked. 
	But with the family there are infinite puzzles. So why not stay, locked in, puzzle after riddle, key after code, as the baby learns to sleep, the kids to converse and to reason, and feel the delayed gratification of realizing something you half-learned years ago?