On Saturday night students put their wits to the test as they tried to figure their way out of a self-destructing spaceship and a cursed Egyptian tomb. 

Groups of students were sent into two escape room tents at CAB’s Point Park After Dark Event on the fifth floor of the Student Center. The teams had 15 minutes to find clues and solve puzzles inside the tent in order for the flap to drop to “release” them. 

The tents were provided by Phantom Entertainment, an outside company that CAB used at their first escape room event last year in January. 

Students had the opportunity to solve two different themed rooms. One tent was based on an Ancient Egyptian tomb and students had to use artifacts and hieroglyphics in order to find the clues to open a sarcophagus that would allow them to escape. 

The second room was designed like a spaceship, requiring students to use colors and numeric codes to escape before the ship self-destructed. 

Freshman Trey Reininger, a sports, arts and entertainment management major, Kieran Khanna, a freshman theater arts performance and practices major and Geoli Yeager, a freshman journalism major, were a team that successfully solved both escape rooms. 

According to Reininger, the team escaped the Egyptian themed room with nearly nine minutes to spare, and left the spaceship room with four minutes still on the clock. 

Yeager said the spaceship room was a challenge because they couldn’t find a number code hidden on the wall that could only be seen with their UV flashlights. 

“We spent four minutes looking for a place to shine our UV lights,” Yeager said. 

Both Reininger and Khanna said the Egyptian tomb was their favorite out of the two. 

“I liked the Egyptian one because I got the whole Egyptian thing, trying to unlock the case and get rid of a curse and whatever, it was fun,” Reininger said.  

Yeager was the only member of the team who had done an escape room before. She said these escape rooms were better than the one she had done before. 

“I’ve technically done a janky one at our library,” Yeager said. “It was even more set up than that. They’re a really good set up for being mobile; the library was really like some sheets of paper floating around.”

After finishing both rooms, the group started a plan to go to another escape room in the South Hills that night. 

“We had so much fun [that] we’re going to an actual one,” Reininger said. 

Nick Poprocky, the graphic design coordinator of CAB, said his group didn’t make it out in time. 

“We did the space themed one, the Star Trek one. It was fun, it was difficult. It took us a while to figure out what we were doing and by the time we figured it out it was pretty much too late for us,” Poprocky said. 

Issy Yobbagy, a junior psychology major and CAB member who chaired the event, said the success of the last year’s escape room was why they decided to have the event again. 

“We like to bring back stuff that students have enjoyed before, and since this is a company we had before we knew that people liked it so we brought it back again for this year,” Yobbagy said.