Dunedin embraces the great escape

From top, Escape Dunedin owners Sally Knox and Bill Frewen with game master Magali Larroche at their Moray Pl basement. Photo: Gerard O'Brien
From top, Escape Dunedin owners Sally Knox and Bill Frewen with game master Magali Larroche at their Moray Pl basement. Photo: Gerard O'Brien

Locked in a blackened basement, Craig Borley enters the dark world of real-life escape games and emerges with a few life lessons. 

You can learn a lot about your colleagues when you're trapped in a basement with them.

For example, you can learn a photographer is canny, but doesn't always play by the rules.

You can learn a videographer can be very polite, but a bit of a deadweight.

And you learn being trapped in a pitch-black room with nothing but a few obscure clues, a couple of companions and the pressure of a ticking clock is a lot of fun.

Which is good news for Dunedin as the city's newest attraction, opening officially today in a Moray Pl basement, is a real-life escape game.

Called Escape Dunedin, it lurks beneath the Savoy Building, filling the passageways and rooms well below street level.

The concept is simple: you get locked in a room and have to escape.

A riddle precedes your adventure, which the Otago Daily Times crew immediately forgot as we entered the first room, the lights were switched off, and the door was shut behind us.

And that's it. A wee riddle and three men alone in the dark, trying to get out.

To escape you must find clues, explore, work together, solve problems.

You become a team. It took all of a minute or two for us to be working as an efficient and coherent two (plus our videographer).

There were clues everywhere, we just had to find them.

And it's that immediate building of camaraderie that hooked Escape Dunedin's owner and director Bill Frewen when he first experienced the concept in Melbourne.

He was on holiday with friends earlier this year when his group stumbled upon an escape game, he said.

They played, they were hooked, and Mr Frewen's mind immediately turned to Dunedin.

The city's intellectual heritage, its growing tourism and conference industries, and the slightly mystical nature of its old buildings seemed a perfect fit.

So, he scoured the world for the highest-quality escape game and found one, in Edinburgh, to emulate.

A partnership was formed, and Escape Dunedin was the result. One game, called The Traveller, was soft-launched earlier this month and another, Contagion, will open in a different section of the Savoy's basement within the next two months.

Escape games originated online in Japan, Mr Frewen said, before ''someone had the great idea that you could do this in real life''.

It took off, across Asia and Europe, and had now spread to Australia and New Zealand. Auckland, Wellington and Queenstown all had their own versions.

But Dunedin's had a few trumps up its sleeves, Mr Frewen said. The Savoy's underbelly was one of them.

''It's a really engaging space - that sense of immersion you get coming down into the basement.''

The city's intellectual air was another, while the collaboration with the tried and true Edinburgh model meant instant quality, without the need for learn-as-you-go teething problems, Mr Frewen said.

Hard-core gamers, students and teachers, tourists and corporates wanting team-building experiences were all obvious targets for the business, he said.

The team-building aspect was particularly noticeable during the ODT's escape attempt.

Working together in the dark certainly felt more sensible than bumping into each other without communicating.

''There are many puzzles to solve, and it's surprising how people's talents emerge,'' Mr Frewen said.

''There are visual people, there are analytical people. It's trying to get people to feel a sense of achievement and team building.

''No one person can solve every problem themselves.''

By the time a team had escaped the basement, they would have solved about a dozen puzzles, Mr Frewen said.

''It's not all beer and skittles, too. Sometimes people argue, sometimes people have different ideas about how a problem's going to be solved.''

One family group had included a 9-year-old boy, who began the challenge thinking he would have nothing to add, he said. Before long, he was solving puzzles the adults couldn't figure out.

And that sense of achievement made the game a sure thing for tourists coming to Dunedin who had played escape games elsewhere.

''They're hungry to do it again. So if they land in a town and there is one they'll want to do it.''

That sentiment is certainly true of the ODT's basement escapees.

We made it out alive, carrying our videographer with us, vowing to come back with friends and family.

Not a bad addition to Dunedin.

craig.borley@odt.co.nz

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