In the basement of the Engineering & Technology Building, the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) hosts an annual Haunted Room Escape, on the nights of Oct. 20, 21, 27 and 28 from 5 p.m. to midnight, and Oct. 30 and 31 from 4-10 p.m.
The event includes two rooms, with two sets of difficulty. The ROTC allowed the University Journal staff to go through the rooms early to do a review and preview of the event.
The first room, the Psycho Clown Room (PCR), is filled with locks and puzzles, all while being followed by “Happy Clown.” The room includes VR goggles and mysterious fans.
The UJ concluded that PCR was the easier of the two rooms, and included mostly logic puzzles and clever reasoning.
The second room, the Paranormal Experiment Room (PER), was the harder of the two for the University Journal. The goal of this room is to discover the clues left behind by a time-traveling scientist, who is attempting to save the world from zombies.
Guns are found in this room, which are then used to fight off the zombie horde. The zombies do not purposefully touch you, but if participants do not move out of the way of the zombies (or bump into them like Editor-in-Chief Samantha Burfiend) then the participant relegate to a cot for five minutes for a “time-out.”
This room includes a larger portion of math. The supervisor for the area said as long as someone has passed MATH 1010, then they should be able to finish the problems, but take that as you may (The UJ did struggle on this part).
Each room allows for two hints and 45 minutes to solve the puzzles, however, the hints are generally pointing out other hints that have not been found in the room.
All of the money raised from this event gets put back into ROTC, which then gets used for events and gear.
Ryan Savage, a senior criminal justice major from Hesperia, California and S3 in ROTC, described the state of the gear prior to last year’s fundraiser.
“I remember a couple of years back … we split a bag of paintballs over the semester … and the training value of that just sucked,” Savage said. “ … Last year, after the escape room, we had bags upon bags upon bags.”
Savage was “Donald Drumpf” in the escape rooms, a supervisor of the event. Savage’s mother created the former Masterminds Escape Room, which was sold earlier in the year.
“There’s not much to do in Cedar … and this is really popular in California, so we just bring it back here and people love to do it. A lot of people are actually coming out,” Club President Carmen Savage, a junior criminal justice major from California and team leader for ROTC, said.
Each room allows up to 10 guests, and tickets are $20 per person, however, a discount is made if the group has at least 7 people, dropping the rate to $15 per person. A second room will cost $10 per person.
Reservations are preferred, and can be made by calling (435) 592-3501 or (435) 865-8596.
Story by
Andrew Leavitt
life@suunews.com
This story was originally published on Oct. 21, and was re-published to feature the video.
