In a city populated with eccentric characters, New Orleans' riddle-loving DeLaporte family may take the king cake. According to legend, when their infamously curious, sprawling mansion was demolished to make way for a new hospital complex near the New Orleans Superdome, relics of their former glory disappeared only to mysteriously reappear in the guise of a lone, puzzling room inside a nearby, largely abandoned post office building. Visitors are advised to keep their wits about them, whence they may find the DeLaporte treasure, lost for years.
…Or so the story goes, according to Andrew Preble and Michelle Calabro, the co-creators of Escape My Room. For the DeLaporte family never really existed, and its cache of mysterious treasures – known and waiting to be discovered – is an incentive hewn from nothing more than Spanish moss and New Orleans' thick air.
What remains unquestionably true is that only those who are especially clever manage to escape unaided; statistically speaking, just one in three succeed in solving the rotating cadre of riddles unaided. The rest of the game's participants join the ranks of those lost investigators left wandering the room for all eternity… or, rather, until the hour has expired and the appointed guide reveals all the devilishly difficult clues they'd missed along the way.
A visit to "the DeLaporte family ruins" includes being assigned to one of several rooms at random, whence participants are given only one single hour to solve whichever puzzle the game-makers feel like throwing at you. If successful, this reveals a specific aspect of the family's "long and storied history," thereby elucidating something occult and glorious about present-day New Orleans that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. That last bit is the true treasure at stake.
The carnivalesque waiting room is a wunderkammer in and of itself worth a visit, regardless of the items' authenticity. Populated with bizarre taxidermy creations, antique furniture, and reanimated creatures that look straight out of Brazil, Escape My Room is the kind of uniquely entertaining exploration of the intersection between fact, legend, spook, and intellect that fits New Orleans to a T.