An Exclusive Look Inside the QC’s New Escape Room

The escape room craze has finally come to the Quad Cities, and yesterday we tried it out for ourselves to see what all the fuss is about.

For those of you who are not familiar, an 'escape room' is a game where you get locked in a room and have to figure out certain puzzles to unlock your way out. Think of the movie "Saw" if it were combined with a dungeon from any of "The Legend of Zelda" games.   Now for legal reasons you aren't actually locked into a room, but in order to get out you do have to accomplish certain tasks.

For yesterday's purposes we tried the new Bustout Live Escape located in Bettendorf. Scott Carpenter is the owner and operator of this game and he's also the brain behind the puzzles. He told us yesterday that this is an activity he and his daughter enjoyed doing together and that he wanted to be able to share this with other people from the Quad Cities.

There are three different rooms to choose from and each of them have their own obstacles for you and your team to figure out. The rooms include:  The Kidnappers Escape where you have to save the baby, the CSI room where you have to solve the murder, and Pirate Treasure where you have to unlock a chest to get to Captain Matt Spac's long lost treasure.

We opted for the Pirate Treasure room after Scott told us it was the most difficult. In fact,   only 25% of all teams who have tried it were able to open the treasure chest. Being that we are a group of relatively smart individuals, we should totally be able to figure this out, right? Of course, as we found out, It's not as easy as it sounds.

First, you have to take your phone and put it in a container with everyone else's phone. This forces you to work together to talk this out. You don't get to phone a friend, but you are allowed two clues if and when you decide you need one. You have sixty minutes to figure out the challenges, but if you choose to use a third clue it will take five minutes off your time.

Dwyer is terribly afraid to be locked in any sort of room and would only go in if he could bring a pizza from Hall of Fame to eat while we worked out all the puzzles. I'm not going to reveal any of the details of the puzzles. You're going to have to figure them out for yourselves when you try this out. I will say though, that we did unlock Captain Matt Spac's treasure chest.  This was only after we asked for two clues and then a third with less than ten minutes left.  We asked for the third clue in fear that we weren't going to figure it out in time. We managed to get the treasure chest open, but Scott might have been being easy on us when it came to the time limit. Scott wasn't lying though, this was a lot more difficult than we anticipated.

If you would like to try Bustout Live Escape you can set up an appointment with Scott at 563-362-8278. It's $25 per person and teams of up to eight people are allowed. They have three unique escape rooms each with its own unique style.