Chapel Thrill Escapes opens new space-themed room

This past Monday, Chapel Thrill Escapes opened their new escape room, “The Morehead Odyssey,” located in Cobb Residence Hall. The room was available for free this past week for all on-campus students, and it will officially open this Monday to the general public. 

UNC senior Rohan Kashyap, Chapel Thrill Escapes' chief executive officer, said that this room has taken longer than usual to finalize due to the club’s partnership with the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.

“This shows that we’re not just a club on campus doing something small, we are actually doing something pretty major, pretty significant,” Kashyap said. “The fact that an organization as massive as Morehead Planetarium was willing to partner with us to help us make this happen is proof of that.”

Club members learned about the history of the planetarium while using it as inspiration for the new space-themed room. 

UNC senior Mateo Alvarez is the executive director at Chapel Thrill Escapes. Alvarez oversees the building team, which is responsible for creating the puzzles and making the room come to life. 

While creating this new room, the building team first started by brainstorming themes and storylines. The team is then divided into subgroups of different areas of focus, such as room decorations, technological aspects and more. 

Alvarez said that the team tries to work out the details and connect the puzzles to each other.

“And if we don’t end up figuring out how to do something, we can work around it and try to do something else," Alvarez said. 

Before a new escape room is open to the public, it must go through what sophomore Tanvi Sathish calls “beta testing.” Sathish is the co-chief operating officer for Chapel Thrill Escapes and works more on the operation side of the escape rooms, as opposed to the building side. 

Beta testing, which occurred before the week-long trial period for on-campus students, consisted of multiple test trials of the escape room. The operations team observed how the players interact, how quickly the different puzzles are solved and if everything runs smoothly. 

“For example, there’s one puzzle in the new room that people were able to solve without actually going through the lock and going through all of the steps just based on a physical loophole,” Sathish said. “So it’s kind of funny to see all of that.”

After beta testing, the process returns to the build team, who works on fine-tuning the escape room based on the operations team’s observations. 

Teamwork is important for Chapel Thrill Escape members when it comes to creating a new escape room. Alvarez said that he has learned a lot from the people he’s met through the club, for example, woodworking, electronics and design. 

“It’s really cool to meet a lot of people from different contexts and with different interests,” Alvarez said.

Chapel Thrill Escapes is also an entirely student-run business. Sathish said she has learned skills in areas such as business, law and management. 

When she became a club officer, Sathish said she was thrust into the day-to-day operations. Although this was overwhelming at first, she said it was easy to adapt thanks to the help of mentors and club collaboration. 

“We’re the only student-run escape room in the nation,” Sathish said. “You can’t really get this experience anywhere else.”

Club members all bring different skills to Chapel Thrill Escapes, but they all have one common trait: coming together to bring entertainment to fellow UNC students.

“They’re all very passionate about the things that they do and that bleeds through when you talk to them and when you work with them,” Kashyap said. 

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