Emerantia
EMERANTIA of „Escape House“ was my first horror room ever, and as I only followed the tourplan which Santiago has came up with (thank you again for this!!), I wasn’t even aware that this was going to happen. Till the moment we sat on that couch. In the waitingroom. Alone. Without any gamemaster in sight. Reading the instructions on a screen. And waiting.. for an old brown door to open.
What it of course does just a few moments later! It slowly opened, creaking (when I remember it correctly) and we found ourselfs inside a (not very comfy) dark living room. While I tried to avoid standing with my back to one of the (yet still) closed doors (you never know!), the others startet searching through the room. We somehow managed (I maybe wasn’t as helpful as I would have liked to be) to get out of this, just to step inside a big, dark (of course), freakin hallway with flickering lights. When one grabbed a huge black spider out of a vase, guessing it was just decoration (well, it wasn’t), I was glad to find out that my teammates were also scareable.
The door on the top of the stairs was locked, and so was the door to the cellar (luckily). But I should have known that we would come back to this later! I got more courageous over time and so I was able to help solve some of the really nice puzzles that should bring us out of this situation (that we have voluntarily entered) and down into the cellar (jay!).
To the amusement of my fellow combatants, my budding courage was repeatedly thrown back by several moments of shock. Which (I must admit that) were nicely placed and indeed worked very well (as I can confirm). The creators of this “Escape House” (and it is indeed a completely house) found a really sadistic way to make you feel save (with funny actions inbetween) just to scare the hell out of you in the next second (well, that’s how it felt at least for me). There were some terrifying moments, technically and dramatically well implemented, that might have made me jump (and maybe scream), what was funny for my teammates and yes ..also for me (in retrospect). When we finally managed to exorcise the demons in an ocult ritual, we also met the till then well hiding gamemaster, what (believe it or not) made me jump again, because he suddelny came up the stairs we were about to climb down. That was a real interesting experience for me and might have been more likely to smile, for the horror professionals in my team, but I didn’t miss a higher level of horror or even an actor (thank goodness there wasn’t one). As a special surprise, we received a bottle of sparkling wine because we needed less than an hour to escape (I guess we all wanted to get out of this quickly). Thank you “Escape House” for this special and yes, fun experience!
