Escape room offers puzzle fun for all ages
By Melissa Rollins, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
The premise is straightforward: you are trapped in a room with sixty minutes to find your way out. The location is unexpected: The Gould Business Incubator next to SiMT on the campus of Florence-Darlington Technical College. The combination is a winning one for brother and sister team Gavin Smith and Maureen Allen.
Maureen Allen and Gavin Smith, owners and operators of Locked Inn
The idea to open Locked Inn-A Live Escape Room came about after they experienced their first escape room at a venue in Charlotte.
“We fell in love with it,” Allen said. “And we didn’t even escape, which is pretty normal. We came out saying ‘Why isn’t there one of these in Florence?’ We started researching them, finding and going through other ones and really finding out what it would take to start one.”
“Maureen led the charge pretty hard,” Smith said. “I told her I would research it with her. Little by little I was like ‘Heck yeah, let’s do it.'”
The siblings say that their families have been extremely supportive, even helping create and tweak the puzzles, but they admit that the process was more ‘daunting’ than they anticipated.
“It is imperative that it doesn’t get messed up,” Allen said. ” There can’t be a way to skip things you shouldn’t skip. Things can’t be too hard or too easy. You have to have a variety of puzzles; there is just so much you have to get right.”
Making sure they got it right meant not opening Submerged, Locked Inn’s second room, immediately, taking a breather and evaluating everything.
“We had the decor and everything for Submerged,” Allen said. “We just took some time to run Lakewood Lodge and figure out how the puzzles worked and how far apart to stagger groups, things like that.”
Last Friday, the News and Press went through the Lakewood Lodge room with members of the Darlington County School District’s Technology Department.
Smith told the team their room’s back-story before leaving them in the dark to sift through the contents of the room, deciding what was a clue and what was not. The clock, set for sixty minutes, ticked away, at record speed it appeared, and with each minute it seemed more and more likely that they would become the room’s next victims.
Darlington County School District employees wait to enter Lakewood Lodge.
Though they did not ultimately make it out alive, the group worked feverishly through the clues they found around the room to try and aid in their escape.
A second team of school district employees bested the Submerged room, escaping five minutes before their air ran out.
WANT TO GO?
What: Locked Inn-A Live Escape Room
Where: Gould Business Incubator, 1951 Pisgah Road
Florence, South Carolina 29502
For more information, visit lockedinnsc.com or find them on Facebook
