Virtually Yours

From Escaping Rooms to Escaping Reality

Here's a fun fact about me: other than my loved ones, writing, occasional drawing, and food, I love love love puzzles, riddles, and mysteries. I survived my preteen years through the strength of the genius that is Agatha Christie (I was very jealous when my fiancé figured out the ending of Murder on the Orient Express less than half way into the 2017 movie, by the way), I play 2048 and do sudokus way more than I should, and these days I organize a bilingual pub quiz with two other people (a blog post coming about that soon!). I've also tried to talk my fiancé into hosting a murder mystery party at our place, but so far, he hasn't exactly given me the green light (nor a yellow light).

This is why, when I first heard about the existence of the so-called escape rooms a few years ago, I was (almost) as excited as Marvelites at the premier of Infinity War. Now, if you don't know what an escape room is, the innocent explanation, in short, is that it's a physical adventure game, where they lock you and your team of friends in a room which you need to escape within a certain time limit (normally an hour) by finding (and solving) different clues. There’s usually a theme, like a haunted house, a rescue mission, a conspiracy theory, etc. Basically, it’s a lot of padlocks, flashlights, secret rooms, codes, riddles, and all that fun geeky Sherlocky stuff.

The less innocent explanation, however, (and this is my theory) is that it's a psychological experiment. Your friends will show their true colors.

Your mind will go from paranoid...

...to insane.

In some cases, after a while in a little room with a couple more oxygen-sucking beings (a.k.a your friends), your claustrophobia will kick in.

In other cases, you'll regress to a homo not-so-sapiens sapiens, who will either figuratively or literally try to fit an obviously square peg into an obviously round hole.

After the time’s up (or after you've found your way out), you will, however, snap back to your normal self, and you and your friends can all laugh about the experience, take selfies wearing funny hats and holding magnifying glasses and fake pipes, have a drink and blame your possible failure to beat the clock on the language barrier (this one only works if you're an expat, though).

As you can imagine, I love escape rooms but, not too long ago, I heard about something even cooler - a virtual reality room! A friend of mine mentioned that she had tried that in the city of Brussels, which is only an hour of a train ride away from our current home town. Now, I had never done virtual reality before but I immediately knew for whom it would be the perfect birthday gift (in the spirit of this post, let's just say that the right answer kind of rhymes with 'Beyoncé' but is not Jay-Z). So, I asked my friend for the website and a plan started developing in my mind. 

T minus 730 hours

The website was that of Virtual Room Brussels. According to it, there'd been an unfortunate "temporal rift" in the past, which threatened to wipe out the whole human race (oops). Apparently, myself and my team were the only ones who could rescue our fellow humans by saving the so-called Alpha team, thus making us "humanity's last hope." Now, I don't know about you but I happen to take being humanity's last hope pretty seriously. Preparation was required.

I asked two of our friends, who I knew would be up to the task, if they'd be interested in celebrating my fiancé's birthday by doing VR - they were. I then sent a message to VR Brussels asking if we could do the whole humanity-saving in English since we're an international group (a Finn, a Mexican, an Argentinian, and a Chilean) - they said 'yes.'

Through this whole time I did my best to keep this experience a secret from my fiancé. For example, when writing down times and dates about the VR on my sticky notes, I used the code lautriv ytilaer in case he'd happened to have peered over my shoulder. (I mean, yes, it's an easy code to figure out but my fiancé would just have thought that I was writing something in Finnish, so it seemed like a pretty safe way to go).

T minus 48 hours

Two days before the actual date, I went to Brussels to check how to get to the right location (yes, I’m so that person). To my fiancé I told that I needed to go to Brussels for work. “I have this training thing,” I said innocently, and he didn’t ask for details, which was a bummer because I had come up with one hell of a cover story.

To be fair, my birthday-related cover stories have gotten better over the years. For example, our first year together I was planning a surprise party for my fiancé and I tried to get his friend’s contact information so that I could ask him to join. I couldn’t find said friend on Facebook so I had to make up a cover story as to why I needed my fiancé to give me this friend's number:

Me: Hey. A friend of mine is interested in going to Argentina and she has some questions. Maybe you could give me Alex’s phone number so that I can give it to her?

Fiancé: Why would Alex know anything about Argentina?

Me: Because he’s from Argentina... Right?

Fiancé: He’s from Spain.

(A pause)

Me: But he has family in Argentina?

Fiancé: Nope. As far as I know, he’s never been to Argentina in his entire life.

(A pause to quickly think of an emergency cover story)

Me: Oh, who am I trying to kid? Obviously my friend is romantically interested in Alex. But she’s too shy to say it directly. That’s why she’s really asking for his number.

Fiancé: Alex is in a relationship.

Me: Oh, for God’s sake, will you just give me that freaking number already?

T minus zero

Two days after checking out the place, I took my unsuspecting fiancé to Brussels. I only told him that I had a surprise for him, no details. My downfall, however, is that I'm completely unable to keep my cool. Even though I didn't spoil the surprise, all the way to Brussels (and maybe already two weeks prior) I kept saying stuff like, "Are you nervous? I think I would be nervous if I were you," and "Oh, I'm getting so nervous. What if this doesn't go well? What if something goes horribly wrong?" and "How are you doing? Are you getting nervous already? Don't be nervous. I know I'm nervous but you shouldn't have to be nervous, too," until by the end my poor fiancé was - yes, you guessed it - nervous. I mean, that's one way to spend your birthday, I suppose, in fear of what your crazy significant other has planned for you, but it's not necessarily the ideal way to go.

We met our friends a few minutes before the start of the experience. We were under strict instructions not to enter the building before it was time (for various reasons). None of us had ever done VR before. I cannot say much about the experience so as not to spoil it for those of you who might want to try it, but we basically had a little briefing, then each of us went to our own little black room, put on our headsets that descended from the skies (the ceiling), and suddenly, even though we were in different rooms physically, virtually, we were in the same room (this will make so much more sense when you actually experience it yourself). We were also given two controllers, which would be used to grab things in the virtual world.  

After we were all set, a guy came to close the curtain that separated my room from the corridor and was about to leave when he suddenly turned on his heels like Lieutenant Columbo and was like, “Oh, one more thing. I forgot to tell you this before, but since you guys are now wearing these headsets, your brains are connected to this machine, which means that if you die in this game, you die in real life. Oh yeah, and taking the headsets off is no longer an option. Anyway, enjoy, bye." 

Okay, no, that didn't happen, but I was kind of waiting for it to. 😉 

As I said, I cannot divulge much about the content of the experience, but I can say that, at least for me (a non-gamer), it was really cool. The graphics were realistic and I felt completely transported to the different world(s). At first, I wasn't sure I would be able to get used to the controllers, but in the end, using them was kind of instinctive. Of course, some of the skills I had in virtual reality, I totally lack in real life. I mean, if my throwing hand had been that great in high school, I wouldn't have the gym class related traumas I have today.  The only downside I can think of is that it got pretty warm in the room and especially under that headset, but it might have been because it was a very warm day in Brussels. (By the way, Virtual Room Brussels is not paying lil' ol’ me anything for this free exposure – I just really had a great time!)

Anyway, in the end, we managed to save humanity (you’re welcome). And after humanity was saved, we did the only thing that a humanity saving team in that situation would do – took a selfie.

Thank you Virtual Room for a fun experience!