Hi everyone
I month or two ago, a friend of mine (who is a member of my 4 person escape room team) told me about a new show that had started in the USA on the Science Channel called Race to Escape.
A reader on my blog recently asked me if I knew about the show, which made me think that I should write a post on here about it so that other avid escape room lovers could check it out (thanks Alistair!).
The premise of the show is that a team of 3 strangers are blindfolded and placed in a room. Nearby, another team of 3 strangers are blindfolded and placed in an identical room. The teams then need to solve a series of puzzles to escape their room (for a cash prize) before their opponent team beats them.
It is an incredibly addictive show. Given that it is on the Science Channel, they provide commentary on errors made by teams with a scientific/sociological bent, which I find fascinating. It's really interesting to see how strangers work together - who becomes dominant (often the loud, more aggressive personality type), who walks around stressing the whole time and not really adding any value at all, the self-professed "smartest person in the room" who often is as thick as two bricks, etc.
It's a compelling 60 minute show. Anyone who likes escape rooms will love it.
The website for the show is here.
Thanks
Scott
Just watched the first episode and it's awesome, so hilarious. And scary to imagine what I'm like when I play escape rooms... lol.
ReplyDeleteHi K
DeleteGlad you enjoyed it! It's definitely hilarious, until that is you realise how alike you are to the people on the screen ;-)
Each episode gets better and better.
Scott
I think the first season might be done (or on a break) - I can't see any more episodes currently scheduled. I also understand that this show starts to air here in Australia on 9 September 2015 on the Discovery Science channel (which I assume is on Foxtel??)
ReplyDeleteI finished watching the season. A lot of these puzzles were pretty impressive, and I wouldn't mind being in most of them. The whole mechanic of starting in handcuffs and having to work out how to get free as a first step is interesting.
ReplyDeleteThat said I dunno why, but I found this show... kinda frustrating to watch. Maybe it's because the host and the VFX constantly pointing things out to the audience meant that I just wanted to scream to the teams "LOOK! IT'S RIGHT THERE!" And episode 6 was just painful. A fair few of the puzzle solutions were a little bit unintuitive, at least to me, mostly because they involved vandalising or destroying props, which is a big no-no in escape rooms (though I guess these aren't true escape rooms but rather TV sets).
Slight spoilers from here on. The host occasionally talked about the psychology behind things that were going on, but one thing he didn't mention which I happened to notice: over the six episodes, the team in the soothing blue-walled room beat the team in the angry, fiery red-walled room five times to one, and in that last case, the blue team was leading the whole way but only got stuck on the last puzzle because they didn't look above their eye level. Perhaps coincidentally, that episode was also the only episode in which all three red team members were wearing blue. So here's my completely unscientific, untested and unsubstantiated theory: when you play escape rooms, hope the walls are blue; but if they're red, dressing in blue can help to offset that. =)