If you are looking for a fun way to spend 45 minutes to an hour together with your friends, you should test your group’s puzzle-solving abilities in an escape room. Escape rooms have become a popular activity in Ottawa, and earlier this week I had the pleasure to try out Captive escape rooms which are located downtown Ottawa at 208 Slater Street.
Captive escape rooms has locations across Canada and the US, with each location offering the same 4 rooms. The four options are Dracula’s Library, Charlotte, The Surgeon, and Cabinet of Curiosities which is designed for large groups.
For my room, I selected Dracula’s Library. For this room, you are in New Orleans in 1862 as a group of investigative journalists we have been tracking down the world’s oldest vampire. Unfortunately for your team, your attempt to find Dracula has not gone unnoticed. Tricked by Dracula you are lured into a mansion and have to race to escape before he returns.
To prevent any possible spoilers of the clues within the room, the photos are simply of the waiting lobby and not the escape room. As the rooms at Captive escape room are the same at the various locations in North America this has allowed them to focus on developing outstanding rooms with rich puzzles. All 4 rooms are solved in a logical order where one clue directly leads to the next, so multiple puzzles cannot be solved at the same time which can sometimes lead to further confusion.
Within Dracula’s Library, I appreciated the intuitive design of the room, the variety of the puzzles, and found the decor to be very immersive. Each person on my team was able to demonstrate their strengths as each puzzle required different strengths to solve it, and collectively we were able to work together to unravel the clues.
Although Dracula’s Library says it can accommodate up to 7 people, I feel that a team of 4 is ideal otherwise it would be too crowded and there would be some people with nothing to do. I highly enjoyed the experience and found the room hard enough to provide a challenge but not so difficult that it would be impossible for novices at escape rooms to escape.
With ample time left on the clock, my team successful escaped Dracula’s Library and can’t wait to try one of the other escape rooms at Captive!