There’s a new escape room coming to CT. Will you be able to solve the puzzles and get out?
Something out of the ordinary is planned for downtown Middletown: an escape room and virtual reality center.
The owner of Lara’s Labyrinth in Wethersfield is planning to open a similar operation on Main Street.
If all goes to plan, players could be sorting through clues and figuring out puzzle solutions by as soon as late winter, Jonah Evenson said Tuesday.
“Middletown is geographically centered, and I think we’ll be getting people coming from the north and south, and the east and west,” he said.
The specific themes of the Middletown escape rooms haven’t been disclosed, but are likely to follow the pattern in Wethersfield where players find themselves in locked rooms with foreboding names like The Curse of Osiris, Cell Block 4 and The Heart of Bastet.
Players get 60 minutes, and to win must figure out how to escape. Teams of two to seven are possible at the Wethersfield location, with prices from $99 to $249.
The Heart of Bastet puzzle is described this way “Deep inside the Pyramid of Giza, an ancient shrine dedicated to the Egyptian Goddess Bastet has been unearthed by your team. You have been obsessed with the story, The Heart of Bastet, ever since your grandfather whispered it to you at night while putting you to sleep. He disappeared years ago at the exact same site. Was it sabotage? Did he just run out of air? Or could more sinister forces be to blame?
“Your grandfather was considered the best archaeologist of his day. How is it possible that you could complete what he could not? Will you find what is left of him? Will you make it out alive? You only have enough air for your team to survive for one hour. You seek the Heart of Bastet!”
Evenson got into the escape room business almost six years ago, opening a popular location in Wethersfield that has been followed by others in East Haven; Hadley, Mass. and San Diego. But when the pandemic hit, it severely disrupted his business.
“COVID just decimated us for 18 months. We’re an indoor entertainment center,” he said.
Even afterward, the customer base at the Massachusetts location hasn’t been what Evenson had hoped for, and the East Haven center didn’t generate quite enough business either, he said. The plan is to close both of those operations this winter and consolidate their offerings at the new Middletown facility.
“In Hadley, I though the student population from the five area colleges would support it. But they didn’t come out. And without them, that western Massachusetts corridor just doesn’t have the population to support it,” he said.
“In East Haven, our lease is up in January. The (rent) price point was fantastic and it was close to I-95, but traffic in either direction is atrocious so we didn’t get the people coming from Branford or Old Lyme or that direction,” he said. “Wethersfield by far has our most bookings.”
The new Middletown location is just a few minutes’ drive from Route 9, less than 5 miles from I-91 and a two-minute walk from Wesleyan University’s campus.
The nearly 80-year-old building at 425 Main St. has mostly been three stories of office space above a ground floor retail operation, but Evenson wants to change that. The third floor, which once housed a regional Social Security Administration office, will be converted to at least four themed escape rooms along with a virtual reality center, Evenson said.
Lara’s Labryinths typically use about 4,000 to 5,000 square feet of space, and Evenson told town planning officials that he’d use 4,500 square feet of the third floor. That would accommodate multiple escape rooms, the virtual reality center and a control center where a staff person monitors the games in each room.
The Planning and Zoning Commission will conduct a hearing Dec. 13 at 7 p.m. at city hall on his request for a special zoning exception to allow indoor recreation at that location.
Evenson, who runs an insurance company as his day job, said he enjoys bringing the various rooms, story plot lines, clues and puzzle pieces together, but mostly likes seeing people have fun.
“The joy is really in watching groups come though. About six years ago, my wife and I took our kids to an escape room and I started researching how they work, going on the websites of all the ones in this area,” he said.
Rooms at East Haven are currently The Inquisition, Dragonborne and The Museum Heist, and it’s likely some will be transferred to Middletown.
