Escape Game Training: 5 of the Biggest Brain Busters

One of the things that keeps escape game fans coming back again and again is their love of puzzles. You never know what sort of jumping jacks your brain will be asked to do, so it’s never a bad idea to get exercise with all different sorts of puzzles.

For you puzzle fanatics (and that very much describes us here at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game), we’ve pulled together five of the hardest brain busters out there to construct the Ninja Warrior course of the puzzle world.

1. Test your selective attention

Think you’re an ace at evaluating your surroundings and picking up on what other people miss? See how well you do with this awareness test devised by psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.

2. Flex your Mensa muscles

Ever heard of Mensa? Of course you have. It’s only a society of the biggest brains on the entire planet. You can see how you stack up against all the geniuses of the world by exercising your brain with the Mensa Workout available on the official Mensa site.

3. The ultimate NYT crossword

The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle is notorious for being the most difficult puzzle available in any given week. So how about the most difficult of the most difficult: the December 26, 1987, puzzle devised by Daniel Girardi.

You can download and attempt the hardest NYT crossword of all time here.

4. Go on a puzzle adventure

OK, so you’ll have to actually get your hands on one of these puzzles, because this one exists in the real world: the Isis Adventure Series. Considered one “the hardest puzzle” in the world, this puzzle set requires you to solve one before you can move on to the next, each getting progressively more difficult. You can get your set directly from the Sonic Games website.

5. Get your logic on

Why do one incredibly hard logic puzzle when you can do ten? Scientific programmer Patrick Min has got you covered with this list of the hardest versions ever of ten different logic puzzle types, including Sudoku and Go. Click to bend your brain.

Now that your brain is in peak condition, see if you can bust all four of our escape rooms at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game. Book here: http://bookeo.com/krakit.

Escape Rooms As A Way of Life: The Legend of Zelda Method

© Nintendo

We’re living a little in the way that Link from The Legend of Zelda.

We spend our solo time traversing ‘fields’ of personality, looking for ‘rupees’ for physical sustenance, plucking ‘hearts’ for emotional fulfilment, and fighting minor demons abounding sporadically. From the fields, we head into bustling towns (like Burnaby) where we find collective persons in meeting places. We relate to these strangers who inspire within ourselves greater goals, furthering our paths beyond the fields we roam. This is the nature of the business we conduct in our life path and career directives. 

When we have found the proper motivations from the townspeople, i.e. what we can offer vs. what we are lacking, we then head steadfast to seek the inside of a dungeon (Krakit Escape Room) where we are isolated to face down our greater demons: those hidden from the populated fields and towns. We become like the hermit, seeking inner truths in the dark caverns within. Our quest is to escape and the only escape is confronting evil head-on.

First we seek anchor in finding a navigation tool, a compass, to enlighten us as as to our core principles (that way to shed light on our demon’s location), where to find the tools to defeat the demon, and the key required to get some face time with our inner foe. This dungeon is not only our situational escape room, but the liberation of our optimal identity from self-defeating ideologies.

The maxim ‘when the student is ready, the teacher appears’ reveals the locking mechanisms unlatched by the riddles of existence in Link’s field-town-dungeon whence the keys to success appear neither amidst nor before completion. This is the definition of the escape room: if I perform Task A then I will be able to unlock Item X in order to move on to Task B. Then, voila, the door is open and you’re free to move forward.

Whether the room is metaphorical or physical, the pursuit of higher goals requires we traverse our internal escape room (or, in Link’s case, dungeon).

Deep Freeze!! Top 3 Wintry Escape Scenes From The Cinema

Vancouver has been thrown into the deep freeze!

A cold front has swooped down from the Arctic, crippling the city. Traditional zen lotus-eaters are losing their minds in traffic, lineups for winter tires are two-blocks long and yoga classes across the lower mainland have been suspended; it is pure chaos in the rainy city!

With more snow on its way, the Krakit team are preparing for a full-out winter assault. And what better way to prepare for snowmageddon then a light-hearted review of our favourite snow-bound escape movie scenes?

Here are our top three wintery escape scenes from the cinema:

3. The Spy Who Loved Me

Roger Moore, as James Bond, is up to no-good in an Austrian chalet when Queen and Country calls. Leaving a fair maiden (double-agent) wanting Moore, Bond dons a Ronald McDonald ski suit and heads out the door. The fair maiden shows her true hair-colour and calls in a ski attack.

With four armed agents in pursuit, Bond does some epic glacier skiing. His path takes him through a narrow ice shoot, he fires a ski pole rocket at one of his enemies and he pulls off a backflip half twist before skiing off a mountainside.

Of course Roger Moore was never on skis in Austria, but neither were the stuntmen. The entire sequence was filmed in Nunavut, Canada on Asgard Peak on Baffin Island.

The final cherry on the escape is the parachute design - a giant Union Jack flag. Well-done James.

2. The Empire Strikes Back

By far the best film of the Star Wars series (fingers-crossed for Rogue One), Empire starts on the icy planet of Hoth. After investigating a meteor (probe droid), Luc is sucker-punched by a snow beast. The young Jedi is taken back to the Wampa's layer where he is imprisoned in ice foot shackles.

Upon waking, Luc tries desperately to free himself before remembering that he has this wonderful gift called the force. Using Yoda's lessons, Luc is able to summon his light sabre from across the ice cave, cut off his shackles and slice the arm off his captor.

I guess with the force any Vancouver Escape Room might seem like a kids ballroom. But then again, maybe not...

1. The Thing

John Carpenter's The Thing is a sci-fi classic. The film includes aliens, a wintery locale on Antarctica and the always-entertaining action star, Kurt Russel. More of a mystery (who-done-it) tale then the other two films, The Thing has a group of scientists and remote technicians wondering who is the assimilated alien in the group. The snow flies, the crew accepts their fate and one-by-one the infected are killed off.

The final scene has MacCready and Childs share a drink, while the research station burns in the snowy background. Both men suspect the other of being infected, but with nothing left to fight for, a thin possibility of survival and the doomed fate of mankind looming off-screen, the two choose to let the time run out, leaving the audience guessing as to who was human.

And If you brave enough to stand the cold, come out to our Vancouver Escape Room! You might be shivering, but it won't be from the cold!

5 Locks You Don’t Want to See in an Escape Room

Escape rooms and padlocks go together like peas and carrots (CC BY 3.0)

One of the major features of an escape room is solving clues that will either lead you to a key or provide the code to open a lock. Solve enough puzzles and open enough locks, and you might just win your freedom.

Being such an essential part of play, you should fear any escape game that uses locks beyond the regular padlock or keypad lock. Keep your eyes peeled for these.

1. The Houdini Dead Lock

You might’ve guessed it from the name, but this lock has a few tricks up its sleeves. The Houdini Dead Lock may look like a simple padlock, but this puzzle lock is anything but. If you come across one of these in an escape room, you’ll probably use up all your time just trying to figure out how to get it to pop.

2. The Android Pattern Lock

Sure, they may look cute on your smartphone, but could you imagine trying to crack one of these while under the pressure of an escape game countdown, with zombies clawing on the other side of the door? Using just nine dots, the Android Pattern Lock has 389,112 possible combinations. Yikes.

3. The Lunatic Lock

Looks like a lock, walks like a lock, doesn’t talk like a lock. The Lunatic Lock is another that on first glance looks like any regular old padlock—but once you look closer, you realize there’s no spot for a key to go. Repeat: NO KEYHOLE! This one would keep your escape room all tied up, for sure.

4. A Musical Lock

While this type of lock—which requires the correct musical tones to open it—might not be uncrackable, it would mean you have to do a little acapella for your escape room team. If we had one of these at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game, it’d probably be set to Meatloaf’s “I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That).” So, watch out.

5. An Iris Scanner

If you encounter any escape room that features an iris scanner—run, don’t walk. You really don’t want to have to deal with any Minority Report-esque enucleation situations on your Friday night out.

See how many locks you can pop at Krakit Vancouver Escape Room by booking a game here: http://bookeo.com/krakit

Experience Immersive Entertainment in Vancouver: Escape Games and More

The trend is being witnessed all over the world: millennials don’t want entertainment that merely entertains or adds to their “pile of stuff”—they want experiences.

From Secret Cinema in London, who turn classic films into catered, costumed extravaganzas, to the rise of escape rooms, beginning with Takao Kato’s Real Escape Game in Japan, entertainment that offers more than a way to “turn off and tune out” is on the rise.

In fact, experiential entertainment is more than just “on the rise.” In 2014, JWT Intelligence—whose business is identifying the “global zeitgeist”—identified immersive experiences as the “leading trend changing the entertainment industry in 2014,” a trend that is continuing to play out as we roll our way through the decade.

Vancouverites craving immersive experiences of their own can find a variety of options right here in the GVRD.

Darkened Theatre (photo: Lloyd Dirks)

Interactive Theatre: Forbidden Vancouver

Not a fan of theatre’s “fourth wall”? Do you love it when actors come into the aisles and maybe even pull you up to dance? Well, then, one of Forbidden Vancouver’s city tours or special events is probably right up your alley.

For their “Lost Souls of Gastown” tour, Forbidden Vancouver combines a walking tour with a theatre piece to bring the history of the downtown neighbourhood alive, while their “War for the Holidays” event combined a holiday party with a WWI-set play.

Find more on Forbidden Vancouver here.

Expanded Cinema: Scent-sory Cinema

Taking a page out of Secret Cinema’s book, the Vancouver-based duo Here There put on experiential cinema as one of the many immersive events they run.

Their Scent-sory Cinema series has featured screenings of Strange Brew, complete with local ales, Montreal smoked meat sandwiches, and Hawkins Cheezies, and a showing of Amelie, paired with a Parisian tasting menu, to name just a few.

You can details on upcoming Scent-sory Cinema screenings here.

Immersive Gaming: Krakit Escape Room

Those looking to take their gaming off the screen and into the real world can immerse themselves in one of four imaginative scenarios at Krakit Escape Room in Burnaby.

Escape games present a way to bring gaming, puzzles, and mysteries into the three-dimensional world, putting you—literally—in the middle of the action. Whether surrounded by zombies or under threat by a mad doctor, you have 40-minutes to solve the mystery in front of you and emerge triumphant.

Investigate Krakit’s escape room themes here, for teams of up to eight.