Built by UMD students, Escape 45 will offer participants adventure scenarios

Ashraf Afzal (left), a Johns Hopkins graduate, and Asad Masood (right), a fifth year mechanical engineering major at this university, stand in one of the unfinished escape rooms at their Escape 45 location in Baltimore.

Imagine you and your friends have been kidnapped from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, trapped in a lighthouse and left with 45 minutes to escape before the kidnapper returns.

With Escape 45, a student-designed escape room coming to Baltimore in December, this adventure scenario and others like it can become reality.

University of Maryland students Asad Masood, a fifth-year mechanical engineering major; his brother Fahed, a sophomore mechanical engineering major; and Dylan Kapoor, a junior biology major, are three founders of this escape room adventure company, which places participants in manufactured situations they must find their way out of.

“An escape room is a team-based adventure where you and your friends, family, co-workers, strangers work together to solve puzzles and break out of a locked room,” said Ashraf Afzal, a Johns Hopkins University graduate and the fourth founder of Escape 45.

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The facility will have about 3,000 square feet and six operational rooms, Afzal said. With escape rooms popping up in cities across the country over the past few years, he said, the four decided to try the experience.

“We went to one and it was just really fun. We thought it would be something great to have in Baltimore,” Afzal said. “And we figured, why not just make it ourselves?”

Afzal said the focus on teamwork and cooperation makes escape rooms a great activity for a group of friends or a business looking to do team-building exercises.

“You could even bring someone on a first date,” he said. “Find out how they work under pressure.”

The four visited several escape rooms in New York and Washington to get a feel for good or bad escape room scenarios.

Asad Masood said they noticed the “bad” rooms focused on numbers or linear exercises such as opening a series of locks. But the more exciting rooms were different, using more automated features to make the escape scenario more engaging, he said.

“We really wanted to use that, to figure out how to make puzzles more automatic,” Masood said. “So when you solve one thing, it could make something else open up.”

Instead of just numbers and puzzles, he said, the team tried to include both thought-based puzzles and physical challenges to accommodate participants with different skill sets.

The team is working on building concepts for each of the rooms, Afzal said. One room will be a jewel heist simulation in which teams have to steal a diamond and escape before the police arrive, and another will be the lighthouse kidnapping scenario.

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They hope to have two rooms running by early December and the other four ready by February, Afzal said.

Much of the planning for the puzzles takes place in McKeldin Library, Kapoor said. Kapoor plans a list of puzzle scenarios and the team talks through each one, picks out the best and plans how they could fit in each room.

“We kind of build off each other’s ideas to figure out what we want our puzzles to be and how we can make them unique,” Kapoor said. “We really want to make it an immersive experience compared to any other escape room. … We want it to be something no one’s ever done before.”

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Three of the founders are full-time students, and Afzal has another job with his father’s medical company in Frederick, so sometimes they don’t have much time. But Masood said they are all dedicated to the project and have gotten a lot of help from friends. Their network of friends, several of whom are also students from this university, have helped with everything from decorating to assembling furniture to working on lock mechanisms for the rooms, he said.

The team will also launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise more funds for the project and spread the word, Afzal said. The four founders have spent a lot of time and money on the project already and there is still a long way to go, but he said it will all be worth it.

“All we really care about is that the puzzles are exciting and people have fun,” Afzal said. “If we focus on making it a great experience, hopefully everything else will fall into place.”