Imagine you are a rookie police officer gathering evidence for court in the trial of the century. You know what you need to get but there is one problem: you forgot the code to the evidence safe. Luckily, you’ve left a series of clues for yourself to find the code. The catch is you need to find the code in an hour or else you’ll be accused of tampering with the evidence.

This is the plot of Escape Room South Jersey’s newest police-themed room which opened at the Glassboro location just before the the school semester started.

Differing from other escape rooms, Derek Lindeman, one of the five co-owners of Escape Room South Jersey, explained the new Police Station room is not structured around a time sensitive situation, like other rooms are.

“Well this room is kinda like a comedy room. It’s more lighthearted than other escape rooms would be,” he said. “So many escape rooms are just dire circumstances… We just wanted to make something that was lighter and just kinda stupid and that’s what this is… It’s low stakes, but a lot of fun.”

When designing new rooms, Lindeman explained that the ideas originate with what would make the best end-photo after participating in the escape rooms.

“…We kinda wanted everybody to have an old-time-y photo basically every time they would do the rooms, that they would have a different photo for every experience,” Lindeman explained. “… So kinda come up with a cool room, make sure we have a cool place to take a picture afterwards in that room, and then we’ll just kinda design all the puzzles around that.”

Similar to this plan of designing, the Police Station was designed around the idea of the ending photo being similar to a mug shot.

“We wanted something that had a cool picture at the end, so we kinda designed it with like you could get your mugshot taken at the end without actually being arrested,” he explained. “And that’s pretty much where it started and we worked backwards from there.”

Lindeman also highlighted that, unlike other escape rooms, Escape Room South Jersey does not lock participants in the room for the hour they are participating and solving puzzles; they want to make everyone feel safe and comfortable.

Excited about the new room, Lindeman feels confident that Police Station will be a success.

“The new room is actually good if no one has done [an escape room] before.”

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