Mikkel Blom
All work

Escape room at Arresten

2022 Became a public event in Grenå

An escape room that ended up as a public event, including a keypad I built with an Arduino.

A playtest: two players with bags over their heads, chained to the interrogation table

The story

We started on it in the middle of August 2022, and it ended up running as a public event at Arresten in Grenå.

It is 28 June 1942. You are two resistance fighters who were caught planting a bomb at a German headquarters, and you start the game chained to the table in the interrogation room. On the way in, you overheard the guards change the arming code for your bomb. Now you have to get free, find your way into the office behind the bookcase, arm the bomb and get out.

Building the room

The room was built inside an existing space, with fabric walls to split it into the interrogation room and the office behind the bookcase, a wall of old pallets, shelves, lockboxes and props.

The finished office with shelves, a lockbox, a pallet wall and a bookcase
The finished office with shelves, a lockbox, a pallet wall and a bookcase
The fabric walls going up during the build
The fabric walls going up during the build

The puzzles

  • The two players each get half of a code and can only solve it by describing their sheet to each other.
  • A bookcase that turns out to be a door, found by the light through a gap and the scratches on the floor.
  • Locked boxes, a hidden key under a table and three books that point to the numbers of a padlock.
  • The bomb beeps its last code in Morse, which has to be decoded with a poster on the wall and typed into the keypad at the exit.

The keypad

The keypad and the bomb are an Arduino with nine buttons, a small LCD screen and a speaker, in a case I 3D printed. I first built it for an exam project at HTX in 2022 and reused it here. It has a start code and a reset code, so the room can be reset between groups without opening anything.

The 3D printed keypad with nine buttons and an LCD screen
The 3D printed keypad with nine buttons and an LCD screen
Me during the development of the escape room
Me during the development of the escape room

Watching the players

There were cameras in the room, so we could follow each group and give hints at the right time, and record the attempts if the players agreed. We tested a camera on a motorised gimbal, so one camera could turn and follow the players around the room.