WINNIPEG – As escape rooms around Canada get back to business, owners are discovering the emaciated corpses of players who couldn’t solve their puzzles when they were forced to close.
“It looks like this poor bastard didn’t figure out that the mad professor’s poem contains an acrostic codeword,” said the owner of Winnipeg’s House of Hints. “And I guess the couple I found in Clueopatra’s Tomb loved each other, but not hieroglyph riddles. Tough break, that was the final hurdle.”
Staff at Calgary’s Puzzle Palace also found the remains of a stumped player. “I’m not saying we don’t feel bad,” the weekend manager said. “However medical examiners said it took this guy several days to die of dehydration, and in all that time he didn’t connect the four digit padlock with the clock stuck at midnight? The room is called Midnight Murder, for God’s sake! It’s our easiest one! There’s plenty of blame to go around here.”
While escape rooms have faced criticism for failing to free their guests before locking down, industry representatives have argued that the situation enhanced the thrill, and that trapped customers should have looked harder for keys in hollow books to open boxes that contained more keys instead of trying to break exit doors down in a panic.
“These idiots didn’t even know how to do Sudoku,” said the founder of Mississauga’s Chamber of Secrets, as she gestured at the trio of bodies being wheeled out of the Soviet submarine room. “And maybe break the portholes to get at the water we stuck back there to enhance the visuals, guys. Their families can hammer me on Yelp all they want, but that’s on them.”
At press time, new restrictions in several provinces were forcing escape rooms to close again, trapping their customers in a variety of hastily assembled COVID-themed rooms.
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