Open Mind: 11S

Escape rooms can be educational or raise social awareness; they don’t have to be just for pure entertainment. There are some topics that are definitely inappropriate as escape room themes, and there are some that are reasonable if handled with care and sensitivity. When I booked 11S I thought that the 9/11 attack and the collapse of the Twin Towers fell into the latter category. By the time we emerged, I’d been mostly persuaded otherwise.

A real world tragedy that happened within most people’s living memory is always going to be a difficult setting for an escape room. To Open Mind’s credit, they haven’t spared any expense in tackling it. In terms of physical layout and presentation, this is one of the most complex and impressive builds I’ve seen anywhere, as well as one of the more physically active ones: expect to crawl and climb, and get past obstacles in various more unusual ways too.

One other factor that diminished the experience for us was that our host seemed impatient for us to finish and leave, both outside the game and also with some heavy-handed hinting during it – though that might have just been the language barrier. That made some steps more confusing than they should have been, though we would likely have struggled in places in any case. Another was the hard hats that we were instructed to wear throughout (and we were sharply reprimanded when we tried taking them off) – I imagine they are in fact important in a game like this to prevent players doing themselves an injury, but as the game went on I found my hat more and more of an annoying encumbrance.

The setting becomes a more prominent part of the game as you progress, in ways that increased my doubts about it as I went along. They’re clearly trying hard to hit the right tone, of evoking the setting and events, of personalising tragedy without being prurient, of setting your game experience in the right context. To me that wasn’t really successful, though I’m not sure there’s something different they could have done that would have worked better – maybe this is just something that shouldn’t be an escape room. Judging it purely as an escape room, there’s a lot for enthusiasts to admire and enjoy, although also a couple of clunkier moments in the puzzles; it’s your call whether that means it’s an experience you want to book into.