Reddit user u/avantgardengnome posed the question: "Escape room employees, what's the least successful escape attempt that you've ever seen?" The thread quickly filled with escape room employees and participants sharing their wildest (and, in many cases, most embarrassing) stories. Here's what people shared:
1. "A huge group came into our escape room. Halfway through the game, the cameras went out. We managed to facilitate the game with audio only, but the group still did absolutely horribly. They barely made it through half the room. I went back in once they were done, and they’d gotten behind the wall and unplugged the cameras so they could pee inside the room. They didn’t even bother with most of the puzzles."
2. "The guy that used a hammer on the drywall because he swore there was a secret door...because he could 'see the seam.'"
3. "We had a group from work go to an escape room for team-building. They got into the elevator, and it stopped working. They spent 15 minutes trying to figure out if the elevator was meant to be part of the escape room or not. They didn't want to press the emergency button because they weren't sure if it was some reverse psychology thing. They ended up getting really hot, and one of the dudes started panicking. He took off his shirt while in the elevator. Basically, they spent the whole time debating. They ended up getting a call from the escape room people asking if they were going to miss the appointment. Then, they waited another hour for the fire department. They got out and had to come back to work. Team-building activities have been on hold since. No one talks about naked Brian."
4. "We had a group of 10-year-olds come in for a birthday party. The adult accompanying them into the room took the walkie-talkie and refused to accept any hints. We even tried to talk through the walkie-talkie with freebies (maybe check under so-and-so), and they just wouldn’t do it. Needless to say, they didn’t get anything accomplished in an hour, and it was the easiest reset."
5. "My wife pooped herself inside of an escape room. She ran out into the car fully embarrassed, and I had to finish the escape room by myself (I didn’t finish). I assumed the employees thought we'd broken up because she dashed out so quickly. When I lost, they still asked me to take a photo…by myself."
6. "The escape room I worked at had a real fire alarm inside the room. I’m sure you can see how this ended up."
"As a guest at an escape room, we had the opposite problem. They had a fire alarm that was actually something you needed to pull to open a secret room. We would have never dreamed of using it until we were explicitly told to do so. We were quite annoyed."
7. "My wife and I got stuck on a door. We unlocked the door, then we pushed it and pulled it for, like, five minutes. We had to ask for help. It slides open. We still solved the escape room otherwise."
8. "A group of brunch-goers came to attempt our hardest room. They had brunched thoroughly and were already very wild and immobile. The room they were attempting was big — six separate rooms with a simulated earthquake that a normal, sober group of six would struggle to do. Turns out one of them snuck beers in their cargo pants and spilled it EVERYWHERE. Ten minutes in, the game was stopped, and they were asked to leave. Moral of the story: Brunch and escape rooms do not mix."
9. "I somehow got into being an escape room tester, and I've seen some bizarre behavior. Usually, a new place will get some friends/family to come in, and then a couple more experienced folks, and the totally new folks can get weird. I was doing a Edgar Allan Poe-themed room, and this lady just sat down and started reading the prop books telling us, 'The answer is in here.' Forty minutes of reading for this lady."
10. "My husband and I have done so many of them, and we usually do fairly well, but this one was our first. We got stuck. We were handcuffed to a bed at what was supposed to be a prison or mental institution (I don’t recall, as it was years ago). It was the very first clue, and we were supposed to find the key. There were codes, equations, random words, etc. all over the four walls. We spent 35 minutes out of the hour combining these scribbles in the most complex ways possible and trying to do complex math in our heads. At one point, I embarrassingly thought some of the words needed to be translated into Ancient Greek. The workers on the intercom kept telling us to slow down and just look at the wall. We kept saying, 'We are looking at the wall!!! We’re trying!' The key was literally just hanging in the middle of the large wall at eye level."
11. "One group spent the entire time arguing and never even solved the first puzzle."
12. "My group once put me in charge of a puzzle involving wires during crunch-time since I'm a tech geek. I stood there with a handful of wires being completely useless, and it took a couple of precious minutes to get the team to stop panicking with their own projects before they realized what was wrong. I'm colorblind."
13. "Went for a friend's girlfriend's birthday. She wanted to do the hardest room they had, so we did, but none of us had ever done an escape room before. She ended up basically having a meltdown and yelling at us. We didn't solve anything, but after about 40 minutes, one of the employees let us use our hint to solve the rope puzzle where someone was tied to the middle of the room."
14. "You get these kinds of people from time to time, but there are people who, no matter how much help you give them, just cannot understand what to do. You get people sometimes where you can straight up tell them, 'Put the code 1234 into the lock that you're holding to unlock it,' and they just will not get it. We have a room where there are backpacks that you find with items inside. In an escape room, if you ever find a bag, usually, the first instinct is to open it. So, I had one team where I told them to check out the backpack in the room, and they just picked the backpack up and then said, 'Now what?' I had to tell them that they're supposed to open it and see what's inside."
"Also, FYI, when we say that we'll be watching your game, we're telling the truth. If you ever go to an escape room, understand that someone is always watching, and they can see absolutely everything that you do and hear everything that you say. I've seen and heard many things that I wish I could forget. Don't be all over your partner to the point where you're borderline having sex in the rooms, and please, don't play an escape room at the same time that you have a phone appointment with your doctor. I learned more intimate information about a woman who is a complete stranger than I ever wanted to know."
15. "Me and my buddies (after a few drinks and a lifetime of construction) did an escape room that had multiple red Xs painted on the wall, and our first instinct was to just kick in the drywall. It turned out you were supposed to put mirrors or pictures or something on the Xs and you could read a code for a door, but we did not get that far. We just put person-sized holes in every wall and were immediately kicked out. We’re idiots, but it was bound to happen. They just got unlucky that it was five people who can rip drywall down really fast."
16. "The first (and only) time I've been to an escape room, one of the guys in my group (a friend's husband) thought he was going to be a badass and just break his way out of the room. So, he whipped out a pocket knife and tried to jimmy the door latch open so he could break out. I suffered so much secondhand embarrassment from that. Just super cringe. Like dude, just play the game."
17. "A friend works at an escape room. A group of moms come in once every few months but do not even attempt to solve anything. They all just lay down or relax in the silence! I think they come to 'escape' life for a bit. The workers all know them, and they are lovely women who just need to escape."
18. "One memorable attempt involved a group who spent the entire hour fixated on a single clue, convinced it held the key to their escape. Despite hints from staff, they refused to move on. When time ran out, they realized they had ignored crucial clues early on, which highlights the importance of teamwork and time management in escape rooms."
19. "Back when I worked at one, I had a couple give up on the room for the last 5–10 minutes and make out with each other instead. I ended up turning the monitor off because I was so done."
20. "We did one in NYC that was totally busted. They prepped the room with the wrong answer key, which made it impossible. They had one puzzle that didn’t work, and the employee at the end just told us, 'Oh yeah, you guys solved this one quickly, but the button doesn’t work.' Another puzzle we had access to was missing one of four blocks, and due to having a mechanism where we’d get locked out for 10 minutes if we gave three wrong answers (then five more minutes every time after that), we couldn’t even try to input random things for the missing digit. We did eventually, but were locked out the whole time. So, we got stuck 20–30 minutes in, then just sat around. It sucked."
21. "The least successful (not really even an attempt) was a group of completely drunk bachelors. They were already drinking in the parking lot at 10:00 a.m., and I was so close to just not letting them participate. They did not manage to solve more than two riddles. Gave all of the tips I could up to the point of telling them the solution, and they just did not believe me. One of the guys sat down on a chair and straight-up fell asleep after five minutes. The rest stumbled around. I was so scared that they would break something. Worst group ever."
22. "PSA: Don't do a wine tasting and then do an escape room. One person just laid on the floor and slept the whole time. The other tried and eventually joined her. My friend and I got some of the clues, but after a while, we just gave up because the wine started hitting real hard. I didn't know until reading other stories that the employees listened to us. Well, I hope we gave them some good laughs."
23. "I went to one once, and we had the code for, like, 15 minutes, and the lock just wouldn’t work. The guy running it finally came in and couldn’t get it either. He ended up giving us a screw driver to take off the side of the lock instead. It was pretty dumb."
24. "We had a work group play for team-building. The second puzzle was to find a key to unlock a desk. The middle compartment lifts up after you unlock it. The person who unlocked it tried to pull it open, and it wouldn’t budge, so instead of then trying to lift it, they proceeded to tell the whole group, 'Guys, we need another key to unlock this drawer.' Now I thought surely someone would double-check this person's work, but no. Everyone believed them, and no one else gave the desk a try. I chimed in asking if they’d like a nudge since they did unlock it and I didn't want them to be stuck, but they shot me down and said no. Thirty minutes went by, and they finally caved and asked for a clue. I told them that desk was, in fact, unlocked; they just needed to lift it open. They were very mad at the one person and did not make it out."
25. "I once saw a group of top-tier Microsoft engineers come in for a team-building exercise and fail a pirate-themed room that 12-year-olds successfully solve all the time. They were obsessed with doing weird things including: listening for Morse code in the ambient wave noises, climbing on each others' shoulders to change the source channel on the projector that showed the intro video, deciding our novelty SpongeBob picture of his pineapple house was a reference to the Pineapple Express airstream, trying to stop the ceiling fan with their bare hands, taking apart the pirate ship wheel on the wall with a Swiss army knife, and debating where 'north' on a permanently mounted map was based on where they must have been angled in the room and where our physical building was in relation to the ocean (there was a compass rose PRINTED ON THE MAP)."
"Software engineers are the smartest fools in the whole, wide world. We kept trying to radio them to stop when things got dangerous, but they kept switching the single designated walkie-talkie channel as though it was also a clue."
26. "We had a radio in our game that linked to a specific station using an FM transmitter. When the player tuned to the correct frequency, it played a nice, clear, loud message from the game character giving a clue. Players thought they had the right frequency, but they were, in fact, tuned to a real radio, and therefore, they accidentally tuned to an actual radio station. The announcer gave the phone number for the radio station, and one of the players called it thinking they would get a clue. I reminded them that phones weren't needed, and gave them some extra time for the clever effort."
27. "I played a cowboy-themed escape room with a friend once. We made it into a second room, which had a few air rifles mounted to the wall, and I assumed they were just part of the theme and decorative only. Well, my friend had other ideas, unbeknownst to me, as I was facing the other direction trying to solve another puzzle. She managed to pull one of the rifles off the wall and fire it. It wasn’t loaded, but made a very loud bang. Yeah…we got in a lot of trouble (still managed to escape, though)."
28. And: "My friend worked at an escape room, and her story made me laugh. A group of guys were doing a room, and they weren't great, but they weren't terrible. But, they also weren't going to escape on time, and they realized it. They all panicked, and one of them stripped off his shirt, and they peed on it and then tried to use that on the door handle to open it. It didn't work."
What in the world did I just read??? Do you have any ridiculous escape room stories? Tell us in the comments!
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.