Explore the dark room at Azaiba Mall in Muscat

T-Mag Wednesday 09/August/2017 18:52 PM
By: Times News Service
Explore the dark room at Azaiba Mall in Muscat

Imagine yourself standing right in the middle of a dark room, with four walls surrounding you and a clock ticking as fast as your heart is beating. You realise that you only have a few minutes to get out of this room before you are doomed. What do you do to escape?

While loitering in Azaiba Mall on not getting tickets for my show, I was so glad to have run into this hole-in-the-wall arcade that read Troom Room and had every inch of its wall filled with photographs and notes of all those who had come here and played. I found this super funky and decided to enquire about it.

This is Oman’s first escape room, a fun game that lets you use logic and mind to get out of a locked room that can only be opened on solving a puzzle or riddle. And all this needs to be done within 60 minutes. The Troom Room offers three adventures, mysteries, and thrill that we need to choose from: Inspector J. S., Treasures of Ubar, Haunted House, and Prison Break.

I entered into the room with my friends, all feeling like Indiana Jones, which just aggravated with the music and the props. With a strategy in mind we marched ahead frantically looking for our clues in the eerie dark room that had some scary props in the midst of which the clues were hidden.

There were three rooms and the challenge was to open all the doors, find the final key and get out of this god-forsaken haunted house. We started with the living room, trying hard to ignore the creepy background noises and solved the first few easily. But as we went further into the mystery, the clues kept getting more difficult and the ticking of the clock louder. The five of us managed to crack some crazy mathematical and logical puzzles leading us to our next set of clues and keys in calendars, under sofas, inside skulls and so on. After half an hour we opened the first door that lead us to a master bedroom that had a huge skeleton lying on the bed, making us scream our lungs out. But since we didn’t have much time in hand, the search got more frantic and we magically got more sharper. We solved all the puzzles with a little help from the voice in the intercom who gave us hints and moved on to the next room, which was the children’s room. We only had 6 minutes left and there were three keys that needed to be unlocked here. We unlocked two of them and found our final clue at 59 minutes and 9 seconds. All of us huddled over the final coffin, trying to get the combinations right, we managed to unlock the final lock, get the key and rush to the main door just 1 second before the final alarm rang. Yes, we emerged victorious. We managed to escape from the haunted house.

When we came out it felt like we actually left the real world behind us. Everything around seemed fun real and a little too drama-less. It took us a few hours to get over this experience, but we did make a promise to return here and try breaking a prison next time. —[email protected]

Troom Room, Azaiba Mall
+968 9667 2927
OMR 9 per person