You start the game in jail — locked in handcuffs, surrounded by brick walls covered in grime and caged in by black iron bars. The story goes that you were framed and wrongly thrown in jail for a $10 million diamond heist.
Your goal: Escape your cell and prove your innocence within 60 minutes by using clues and solving puzzles spread out in three separate rooms.
Credit: Joe Reisigl
This is the first room of Urban Enigmas’ “Innocence” game. Players start handcuffed in a jail cell and have to break their way out while also using practical evidence and documentation to prove their innocence.
That’s the immersive fun behind escape rooms, which is exactly what Urban Enigmas brings to Athens.
“It’s a lot of fun,” said AJ Kooti, owner of Urban Enigmas. “It’s fun to see how the mind works in different people.”
The key behind escape rooms is the challenge of looking at the environment from a different perspective. As Kooti says, “Things aren’t always how they seem.”
When each game starts, players are left in a seemingly normal room where they have to piece clues together to attain their goal. However, each clue tends to play a mind game on the player.
Sometimes basic objects in a room — a stopped clock or a poster — could be clues to find out the number combination on a padlock, and sometimes basic objects are simply props that players waste time on because they think it could be a clue. Sometimes objects that don’t seem associated to one another need to be assembled to move to the next room. Sometimes clues are in plain sight, but players overthink and don’t see the solution.
Many people approach clues and puzzles in the way they’re comfortable approaching their everyday problems. Some view things quantitatively, wanting to turn clues into numbers, while others view things qualitatively, wanting to turn clues into pictures. Groups have to manage these ways of thinking as each room has puzzles that appeal to both ways of thinking.
Players have to consider this all while maintaining the stress of a 60-minute countdown timer.
Urban Enigmas is geared toward any group size — couples, friends, families, sports teams or a team of coworkers — and is a way to promote team building.
Drawing from his experience as an accounting professor at Georgia Gwinnett College, Kooti uses fun as a way to teach people, which is why he debriefs groups on what they could have improved on after each game.
Credit: Joe Reisigl
The waiting room at Urban Enigmas. The company brings escape rooms to Athens, where players have to cleverly solve puzzles and find slyly-hidden clues to find their way out of the themed room they’re locked in.
“You learn a lot more after you experience something because you learn what you did wrong, what you did right and then how to correct what you did wrong,” he said. “You learn a lot more having fun than you do just being miserable.”
The six-month-old company has two escape rooms: “Innocence” and “Dorm Room Daze.” Each presents players with puzzles and clues relating to the room’s theme that challenge the mind to think outside the box.
In “Innocence,” players are challenged to escape their prison cell and use various documents and evidence to prove another suspect had a motive to commit the crime you were framed for. Escaping isn’t the hard part, with an average escape rate of 78 percent, however groups manage to prove their innocence only 17 percent of the time.
“Dorm Room Daze” puts players in a typical college dorm — furnished with foldable couch, UGA decor, dirty laundry and all — and challenges them to find the football tickets their friends hid from them during a party the night before. This more traditional kind of escape room is best for newcomers as it averages a 43 percent escape rate.
The idea to make an escape room business in Athens came to Kooti after he experienced his first game in Pigeon Forge with his wife and stepson.
“That was our first room and we fell in love with it after that, I loved it,” Kooti said. “I thought, why not bring one to Athens?”
After playing through and analyzing dozens of escape rooms in the metro Atlanta area, Kooti went to create his own.
With enough space to make five rooms at its Huntington Road location, Urban Enigmas is tentatively planning to open a third room for smaller groups at the end of November.
Urban Enigmas is also giving back to the community. Throughout October, a portion of the company’s proceeds have gone to Bulldogs Battling Breast Cancer in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Soon, the company will announce its #DoGood Campaign where it will partner and donate to a different nonprofit each month. Kooti said his ultimate goal is to create a hero’s room that will be dedicated to veterans and will donate 100 percent of its proceeds to a veteran’s memorial.
“Giving back has always been big for us, regardless of what it is,” Kooti said. “You give until it hurts, and then you give a little bit more. Because you’re fortunate to have what you have.”
Joseph Reisigl 