China’s New Breed of Gaming: A new generation of businesses has popped up around China and elsewhere in Asia in which players must escape by solving riddles and brain teasers

Chinese Pursuing Great Escapes Think Inside the Box

Players Pay to Sort Clues, Solve Riddles in Bid to Exit Locked Rooms; Skulls, Sewers, Keypads

WAYNE MA and YUKO TAKEO

Updated Dec. 17, 2013 10:38 p.m. ET

People in China are locking themselves in rooms, and they’re doing it for fun. Businesses inspired by an online game called Takagism have popped up around China and elsewhere in Asia in which players must escape locked rooms by solving riddles and brain teasers.BEIJING— Duan Mengmeng peered into a dark tunnel flooded with water and spotted a potential exit. The problem: A series of metal pipes blocked the way.

Ms. Duan, 25 years old, and her five friends—all young professionals in their early 20s—fanned out looking for other ways to escape. Liang Ying, a 23-year-old office administrator, knocked on the walls. Zhang Xiaobao, 24, who works in the media industry, used his smartphone to illuminate the floor and ceiling.

After 20 minutes, they admitted they were stumped.

“It’s all very confusing,” said Ms. Duan, who watched as her more experienced friends huddled to discuss strategy. Most of the group had been trapped before.

People in China are locking themselves in rooms, and they are doing it for fun. A new generation of businesses has popped up around China and elsewhere in Asia in which players must escape by solving riddles and brain teasers—a physical manifestation of a popular type of Japanese online game known as Takagism.

Dozens of establishments in Beijing have opened in the past year to give players the ability to play real-life versions of the game in converted bomb shelters, residential apartments and office complexes. A search on Dazhong Dianping, China’s popular Yelp-like business-review service, shows about 120 locations in Beijing alone.

Ms. Duan’s friends locked themselves in one weekend afternoon at Omescape, a location in Beijing that uses effects to make the rooms come alive. Omescape’s rooms are rigged with lights, electronic sensors and mechanical gears that activate when puzzles are solved to reveal new hidden areas. One room has a secret corridor laced with laser tripwires, while another has a chandelier-like device that gives up a key only when a specific phrase is spoken aloud.

Before Ms. Duan’s group could escape, it would need to find the combination to a safe, bypass three keypad locks, drain the faux sewer passage, solve a word puzzle, a math problem, several chemistry problems and input the correct sequence of commands into a control panel using a joystick—and all in one hour.

As the clock ticks down, players can get desperate. “People have doubts about every object in the room,” said Olym Xu, who runs the business with three partners. “Some players tore down the ceiling boards once thinking there was a secret passageway.” Others have broken the locks off boxes or torn holes in the furniture, he said.

Players sometimes outsmart them. One group solved a computer puzzle by hacking into a PC with its default password. Another opened a keypad lock by typing in the product code from the sticker on the back of a sofa—a match that Mr. Xu said was complete coincidence.

Mr. Xu said he gets his ideas for rooms from friends, movies and television. When several players told the group that it should have a scary room, he turned to Google and Wikipedia and came up with a room centered on a mural mixing up dark gods from Greek, Egyptian and Chinese myths. Embedded in the mural is a diagram showing players how they can escape using two other notable objects in the room: a pair of skulls shooting light beams out of their eyes.

“We don’t do anything just for decoration,” he said.

Mr. Xu, a former corporate lawyer, said the idea for Omescape came after he and a colleague tried a live version that had been set up temporarily. “We thought we could do a better version,” he said. Today, the company has three locations in Beijing and hosts more than 1,000 players each weekend, he said.

The escape-room games are an extreme example of the blurring of the line between virtual and real. Videogame developers increasingly work to infuse their creations with real-life experience, including close-to-life visuals. Motion sensors in game consoles like Nintendo Co. 7974.TO +3.09% ‘s Wii U andMicrosoft Corp.’s MSFT -0.93% Xbox One add an extra tactile sense.

“The tangible nature of the experience—where you get to touch these different objects—and the aesthetics and visceral response to the experience can be more powerful than any videogame,” said Joey J. Lee, director of the Real-World Impact Games Lab at the Teachers College at Columbia University. He added: “Nothing beats the real thing. It’s very realistic to be in a real room.”

Toshimitsu Takagi, the 48-year-old creator of the original, all-digital game, said, “People are looking for a way to break away from a feeling of entrapment.” The Tokyo-based game designer tried one real-world version, in Osaka, Japan, but left unimpressed. “The Osaka game didn’t really give me that ‘aha’ moment,” he said.

Each room at Omescape has a back story. In the case of Ms. Duan and her friends, they were in the lair of a mad scientist named Dr. Viper who had developed a highly lethal neurotoxin that he was about to unleash on New York City. Although police had thwarted his plan, they died in the process, leaving clues as to how to escape.

With time running out, Ms. Duan and her companions had moved into Dr. Viper’s chemistry lab. Two skulls floated in a glass tank in the center. In front of the tank was a control panel with a joystick and several indicator lights. A chalkboard in the room displayed a math formula. Test tubes and beakers filled with different colored liquids sat in each corner of the room.

Ma Ding, 24, who works at a construction-and-engineering firm, helped solve the formula on the chalkboard, while his co-worker, Ms. Liang, took control of the joystick and listened closely to her friends, who shouted out possible sequences based on clues they had found earlier.

After several false starts, a door key popped out of a hidden compartment in the control panel, and the group was on its way to the final room.

Mr. Xu said only one out of every 10 of his clients—who pay about $13 a head for the right to be locked away—successfully escape. If they can’t get out, a game moderator comes in, explains how to solve the rest of the room’s puzzles and then lets them out.

“It’s a simple idea,” he said. “You just need to get out of a room.”