Exit Plan

When I went into work this morning I was filled with the very best intentions for a well-behaved day. I intended to eat salad and veggies all day, to then go home and swim before dropping off to sleep early. Essentially, I was supposed to be on my best behaviour, but following a text from Jules at lunchtime, all those high hopes went flying out of the window!

            Along with a group of friends that she met online a year or so ago, there was a space to join a night of playing “Exit Plan”. Apparently this strange game started in Japan, and has since spread to Singapore through a number of small start-up companies. The basic jist is that you get locked into a room full of props and locked boxes, draws and cupboards. Working your way through a string of both simple and fairly complex riddles and clues, you have to open all the locks, following all the leads and eventually locate the key to escape the doom and win the game. The particular one that we were going to had a zombie apocalypse theme too, which added a little stress, a medical testing lab theme and some horrendous sound effects to the mood.

            When Jules suggested it my first thoughts were that is sounded incredibly random, so of course I was going to join in, and of course Nick was going to opt out (he’d been away for a weekend, he had some laundry and some gaming to get done!). As we weren’t booked to play until almost nine, I left work a little late and finally got to try out a Japanese dish that I’ve had my eye on for a while. It’s not super exciting to look at, it was absolutely delicious!

            You get served up a pile of cool rice covering a curry style sauce, topped with veggies and cheese, and surrounded by raw, thin sliced steak. The plate that the food is served on is actually a sizzling hot platter, which then heats the rice and sauce, and cooks the meat for as long as you leave it in contact with the metal. Once you’re happy with how it’s cooked, you pile the meat onto the rice, mix in the tasty, spicy sauce and you get cracking. It was another success story for being brave with Asian food, and it was another success for my chopstick skills too – there wasn’t a scrap of rice left on the plate, so I must be getting better!

            From this little success story I then made my way through Chinatown in search of the small, unassuming door that lead the way to the Exit Plan corridors. When I finally located it, it felt like the game was starting from the minute I walked in the door. You climb up three flights of dodgy looking stairs, entering into a small claustrophobic lobby before being led into the blacked out, dingy and fairly creepy game room.

            From here, four of our group were chained together and the rest of us were left to try and break our way free. We worked through the riddles and clues, shifting through medicine bottles and severed limbs to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The games are always against the clock – you have 50 minutes to escape, and the channel that we were doing only has a 4% success rate. The pressure was on!

Somehow we did actually manage to set ourselves free, and release the chained up members of the group too, slamming the door closed behind us with just 32 seconds to spare. It was down to the mark, but we made it!