The Great Long Beach Escape
Escaping rooms has become a popular activity. People take part in a fantasy where, within a certain amount of time, they must solve a series of puzzles and riddles. The games are high stakes and players find themselves in situations such as escaping the mob, neutralizing a bomb set to release the zombie virus, or even finding a precious object in a medieval realm.
Escape rooms have linear and nonlinear formats where a team of players can either solve each puzzle one at a time, or divide and conquer. Each escape room varies in difficulty as well as scare factor, meaning that you can’t just stop after solving one. Long Beach has three escape room businesses that use these factors to challenge those who take part in their games.
PanIQ Escape Room
PanIQ Escape Room has four rooms designed by furniture builder turned architect, David Dent.
Room designer and owner David Dent also acts as game master to some of the games. He said the experience is "almost like I'm watching a sitcom every hour." – Photo by Elizabeth Basile
Wizard Trials
Wizard Trials is considered the most popular escape room, labeled as family-friendly with a magical twist. In this room, players use props and four of their senses to gather ingredients needed to make a potion that will free their wizard teacher’s favorite cat, Milka.
Pirates of Tortuga
In the Pirates of Tortuga room, the players are sailors who must escape a pirate ship where they're being held captive. This game is also regarded as family-friendly.
Haunted Manor
The Haunted Manor is supposedly one of PanIQ’s more spookier games, however, gamemaster Jenna Browning said it’s more on the level of the Disneyland ride. Of course, that’s up to you to determine. In this game, players have 45 minutes to help the ghost of a child who previously lived in the manor.
Insane Asylum
The Insane Asylum is the scariest room. Players start by having to find their way out of a blood-smeared cell. Throughout the game, they face numerous obstacles as they try to find the medicine that will bring them out of the brain fog the corrupt doctors have kept them in. However, players only have a limited amount of time before the doctors come back.
327 Pine Ave.
Open Sunday - Thursday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. and on Saturday & Sunday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.
The Ultimate Escape Rooms
The Ultimate Escape Rooms does not look like your typical venue for an escape experience. The room, like the theme, is a trailer on Shoreline Village next to an arcade. You are put in a 30-foot airstream where you investigate how a series of mobile game rooms are being used by the mafia to abduct its customers.
Annette Cortez is the owner. She described the set as a “mafioso gambling hall.” This game room’s mobility has provided the opportunity to bring the escape experience to customers.
419 Shoreline Village Dr.
Open Sunday - Thursday from 12:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. and on Friday & Saturday from 12:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.
Escape Long Beach
Games aboard the Queen Mary. – Photos by Elizabeth Basile
Escape Long Beach is the creation of Tom Cordova. The venue includes two Long Beach-themed rooms that are run by Long Beach State theater students.
Gamemaster Lizzie Doll said that games vary in difficulty level and are even customizable. “Say you need four things in order to solve the puzzle. For level one we’ll have five things in there, for level two we’ll have six, and for level three we’ll have seven plus some distractors as well,” Doll said.
The Queen
Keeping with the Long Beach theme, The Queen takes place on the haunted Queen Mary ship. Players are assigned roles and costumes where each of them must collect the souls that the Queen Mary’s spirit have stolen until her ghostly crew is big enough to sail her ship again.
Like the room’s theme, the set pieces are also locally sourced with real antiques.
The Lab
The Lab is a more technology-oriented alternative to The Queen, where an environmental studies major has created a time bomb meant to wipe out California unless you and your fellow FBI agents, jackets included, can solve the puzzles to shut it off.
3926 E Broadway
Open Wednesday - Sunday from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.