Students try to escape in Halloweek challenge

You’re a private investigator and have spent weeks searching for your top client’s most precious pocket watch, a $40,000 antique piece from his collection. You’ve had no leads until you finally intercept a text message chain between the alleged thief and a potential buyer.

After tracing the exchange to a warehouse, you have 45 minutes to find the watch before the transaction happens.

This race against time was the scenario for Algonquin College’s escape room challenge, held on the second floor of E-building. The event marked the first day of Algonquin’s Halloweek, a full week of spooky activities for students to share their Halloween spirit.

Starting at noon on Oct. 28, students entered two multi-purpose rooms scattered with clues, hammers, fake saws, colourful hard hats and tape measures to transport them into a real warehouse environment.

Three waves of two teams participated to solve puzzles that would reveal codes to several locks. Unlocking a combination of 12 key, directional and digit locks would lead students to finding the stolen pocket watch, ensure their completion of the escape room and give them a chance to win a meal voucher to the Wolves Den offered by the Students’ Association.

Before each wave of the challenge, Eric Marcotte, the host of the event and co-owner of Mobile Escapes, led a huddle to explain the parameters of the escape room.

Teams had three hints available to them if the majority of the group agreed, but the most important tactical advantage would be collaboration.

“You’ll need to work together and use the items that you have (as) part of the room to try to create secret combinations, secret passwords and open up many locks,” Marcotte explained.

For students forming teams with people they’ve never met before, communication and collaboration held the opportunity to make or break their progress.

Nouran Alrai, a pre-health sciences student, went into the first wave of the escape room feeling nervous but quickly developed faith in her teammates.

“We had a couple of people who already did escape rooms before, so I felt pretty confident,” Alrai said. “I was more like, ‘How can I contribute?’ but I think we were a pretty good team at the beginning.”

Alrai, a seasoned escape room fanatic, was impressed with the immersion of the event, the challenging puzzles and how it held up against other escape rooms around Ottawa.

“It almost felt like I was at one of those places. It did not feel like an escape room at Algonquin,” Alrai said. “It was well thought out (and) it was really fun.”

Although they hit some snags along the way, overcoming the puzzles under a time crunch brought Alrai’s team closer together.

“Being with people you don’t know, it’s kind of hard to communicate, but towards the end, I feel like we had that team morale built and we were communicating with each other,” Alrai said. “It was pretty fun.”

Kaitlyn Abernethy, a student who participated in the third wave, was also stressed about teamwork but soon realized it wouldn’t be an issue.

“We were all able to communicate really well,” she said. “It was fun, actually.”

Hoping to have the fastest time of the day, her team split into smaller groups and attempted to tackle multiple clues at once, with Abernethy taking the lead on a puzzle that used blue lights to reveal coordinates that would be the code to opening one of the room’s locks.

Although her team didn’t win, Abernethy said she would gladly participate in another escape room at the college.

The winning team’s 26-minute run time broke a record, according to Marcotte.

“It’s very rare that we see a time below the 30-minute mark for this game, so props to them,” Marcotte said. “They did an amazing job.”