If spending your time in a sealed coffin is your idea of a good time, then we have just the place for you!
Across the pond, one man has invented the world’s smallest escape room which is a locked coffin.
George Larkwright decided he wanted to create The Subject (the name of the experience) wanted his participants to “emerge haggard, almost aged by the experience.”
While it is similar to a traditional escape room where you have to use clues in order to get out — George wants to add another layer which induces feelings of “claustrophobia, desperation as well as dread for the person trapped.
The twenty-something said he was tired of middle-class office workers taking part in escape rooms at corporate events to just post on social media and did not want the players of his game to emerge “giggling and snapping selfies.”
The escape room is based around a 3.5 ft. by 2 ft. by 1.5 ft. black box, and is designed for two players.
Player one is locked inside the box and player two has to help them escape.
Inside the box is a pencil, paper, flashlight, along with the trapped contestant who has to decode a series of cryptic messages and clues written across the walls.
While outside the box, a coded lockbox and another series of documents lays. The players then need to piece together the different information available and solve the puzzles to unlock the box.
He said:
“Escape rooms are increasingly popular, they’ve become a middle-class millennial party experience or corporate team building gimmick. They’re an experience driven by social media for social media. The goal is now to get a ‘we escaped’ selfie at the end’.”
The idea came to the writer and game designer after he read through Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 2, where The Bride is trapped in a wooden coffin.
“I want participants to emerge haggard, almost aged by the experience, but also triumphant, proud of navigating a game that is both physically and mentally taxing,” George adds.
The game derives from a wartime human experimentation and American security services mind control program during the Cold War.
Each player experiences a different half of the narrative and the contestant in the box is a prisoner of war locked up in a laboratory. Player two is a secret services operative given the task of freeing them.
George wanted to create a story that was not just spoon-fed to the players and is planning to take the box on tour soon.