Escape My Room

In a city populated with eccentric characters, New Orleans’ riddle-loving DeLaporte family may take the king cake. According to legend, 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 several, puzzling rooms inside a former perfume shop. Visitors are advised to keep their wits about them, whence they may find the DeLaporte treasure, lost for years.

…Or so the story goes. Did the DeLaporte family ever exist?  The cache of mysterious treasures – known and waiting to be discovered – could be 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 choosing  to experience the Jazz Parlor or the Mardi Gras Study, whence participants are given only one single hour to figure out the mystery. 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.