By Isabel Bretz

Staff Writer

Escape rooms have taken off in the United States within the last couple of years and St. Michael’s College has officially jumped onto the bandwagon, creating their own Harry Potter-themed escape room in Durick Library Tuesday, Oct. 30 and Thursday, Nov. 1.

According to an article in the New York Times, “In 2014, there were 22 escape room companies in the United States,” and today there are around 2,000. Escape rooms are a fairly new type of adventure game that allows teams of friends or family to work together to solve puzzles to escape a fake danger before the time runs out. These well thought out games draw on various types of knowledge around different subjects or themes and if a group has trouble getting out, staff members often dressed as characters will provide hints.

To win the escape room in the Durick Library, groups had to answer questions and solve word puzzles about Harry Potter to unlock the next question and finish the game.

“Most typical escape rooms you have a full hour to do it. We revised ours to just 20 minutes,” said Anthony Bassignani, a Research and Instruction Librarian at St. Michael’s College who helped with the planning and organizing of the escape room. “We needed to get as many teams in as possible.”

This year’s escape room proved to be more difficult than the previous year’s as four out of 16 teams did not finish in the alloted 20 minutes Thursday night and the fastest time was done by a group of five in around 17:29, says Beth Dietrich, a reference and instruction librarian who helped organize the event. However, the “fastest group for the overall thing finished in 10:39,” which was a group of five as well. Dietrich said there were mostly groups of five competing and she thinks “maybe there were too many people in some cases.” Dietrich also said it is interesting to see the group dynamics when in the escape room because it makes a big difference in how successful they are.

Some of the questions for the escape room included “Who’s dad is the editor of The Quibbler,” and “What shop does Draco Malfoy go into in Knockturn Alley,” said first year Abby Bozzuti.

Before entering the escape room, Bozzuti said “I’m hoping that we won’t get through too quickly, because I want it to be a challenge,” however she and her group are self-described Harry Potter buffs so she didn’t think it would be too hard.

Bozzuti, who has read the books seven times each, did not think that the questions were difficult, but if you weren’t super into Harry Potter it would have been a lot harder. Bozzuti and her group finished close to the 20 minutes.

“We had all the answers figured out but the locks (which people needed to open in order to escape) just kept getting stuck and we couldn’t get them to work.” The escape room definitely surpassed Bozzuti’s expectations, she said. She was hoping to see “‘flying’ keys like there are in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” and “some sort of incorporation of different magical creatures since the new Fantastic Beasts movie comes out this month.” The Durick escape room not only had flying keys and fake candles to add to the feeling of being at Hogwarts, but also had bowtruckles made out of pipe cleaners.

Dietrich said that with this year’s escape room being such a big success, she can see there being another Harry Potter themed escape room returning to Durick Library in the future.