What does it mean to be a “Family-Friendly” Escape Room?
Where Escape Rooms Started.
The premise of escape rooms is simple; you and a team of friends are locked in a room filled with puzzles, tricks, and mechanisms and you have one hour to escape. Originally in the U.S., this idea came out of the haunted house industry. The rooms had themes about serial killers and kidnappers. They would include entrails hanging from the ceiling and, in one unfortunately memorable room that our designer played, a pile of leavings that one had to fish through to acquire a critical object.
How Escape Rooms began to evolve.
Gradually, the concept evolved to include zombies, bank heists, and creepy old mansions. Whether it’s who killed the heir apparent of old man Wadsworth’s fortune, snagging the prize while eluding capture by the guards, or curing the zombie apocalypse, the pressure is on! These rooms often rely on some degree of outside knowledge—things like how to read the periodic table, how to open an old-school safe, or how to decipher a family tree.
Elmhurst Escape Room is family-friendly!
At Elmhurst Escape Room, you won’t find any of these themes. We know that people of all ages—and all levels of comfort with horror—can enjoy puzzles. So, our rooms are about the challenge and the fun, rather than an atmosphere of fear or tension. We keep our rooms free of gore and guts, minimize scares (Ok, we mostly minimize scares. There’s a little something in the Captain’s Quarters for the horror fans in the audience), and use puzzles that don’t require outside knowledge. We also inspire a spirit of fun racing against the clock, rather than holding terrible doomsday scenarios over your head if you don’t quite manage to make it out in time. Our rooms are never locked, and you are never locked in. Your task is not to escape, but to find a missing object, a keyword, a treasure, and you are free to step out to take a call, use the restroom or just take a break if you like—though, of course, time keeps ticking!
This is what it means to be family-friendly; an approachable, enjoyable game, with stakes low enough to keep your heart rate in check and puzzles enough to bamboozle your brain. In short, if you love using your wit and are a proficient reader, our rooms are for you!
