First Underwater Escape Room Opens to Divers
Escape rooms are becoming a popular attraction above the surface, but divers visiting Vivian Quarry in Snowdonia, Wales, can experience the excitement of solving riddles and cracking mysteries underwater.
Scuba Escape, started by PADI professionals Clare Dutton and Leanne Clowes, allows divers to choose from six challenges: escaping a money heist, murder mystery, nuclear blast, pirate treasure hunt, princess rescue mission and zombie apocalypse. Each challenge requires divers to complete a sequence of tasks such as searching for buried treasure, interviewing suspects, and reviewing case files.
Dutton and Clowes opened the experience to small groups in April but are now allowing teams of up to six divers to compete against each other to see which can outsmart the game and “escape” first. Each team gets two 45- to 60-minute dives (plus a surface interval), and the experience costs $311 (£220) per person.
The duo came up with the idea for the escape room during the COVID-19 pandemic when trying to think of ways to entertain local divers who could no longer travel for vacation.
"Divers aren't able to do the usual holidays where you can go on a boat in the Red Sea for a week or dive with sharks. So we thought, 'What can we do to make things a little bit different for them?'" Clowes tells Business Insider.
Unlike topside escape rooms, which play heavily on the element of time with clocks ticking down and participants working quicker in fear they’re running out of time, Scuba Escape is much more “chilled out,” Clowes says. "All of the games are suitable for beginner divers, there is no point where a diver will come up against something they did not do as part of their certification.”
The challenges allow divers to test skills such as buoyancy and navigation and can be completed as part of a PADI diving course with an instructor present or on their own. They can also be tweaked for divers of different skill levels depending on the group.
Vivian Quarry was once the world’s second-largest slate quarry, but became a diving hotspot after it closed in the 1960s. Runoff surface water and underground springs currently fill the quarry to about 60 to 65 feet.
Once divers enter through the red doors that block the site’s entrance, “the massive quarry opens out to you and you're completely surrounded by cliff faces," Clowes says — the perfect setting to add an air of authenticity to an escape room dive.
