Edmonton man builds escape room ... in his garage

In Edmonton, you can discover Mars, but there's a little bit of a hitch — it's in a garage.

"You embark on a journey with Red Planet Expeditions, who are a Mars space tourism company, and you are boarding a rover to go on a journey to Olympus Mons, the solar system's tallest mountain and on the way there, catastrophe strikes," said Tom Robinson, the owner of the inter-planetary garage.

That's when you start trying to fix the rover. You have one hour. If you can't solve the puzzles, the consequences will be dire.

Well, dire in a figurative sense.

The garage-based red planet simulator was the brainchild of Tom Robinson, Paul Goebel and Chris Procter. They run the escape room based art exhibit out of Robinson's garage in the Ritchie neighbourhood.The trio were fascinated by escape rooms, so they decided to build their own.

And that's precisely why, at times, Robinson finds himself trying to lure people to his garage.

"I tell them I created an art exhibit in my garage based on escape rooms and they should come give it a try. People are a little bit hesitant but I give them a little spiel," Robinson said.

"After (some) time, they stop believing I'm just some crazy person."

Robinson called his escape room exhibit Red Planet Expeditions. The trio came up with the concept while his friend was reading The Martian. The project was around a year in the works until they were finally able to open the (garage) doors.

Tom said the feedback he's heard from several people is that their puzzles are on the harder end of the spectrum.

Escape rooms are a physical adventure game where the goal is to solve several puzzles while contained to a single room. The most common type of escape rooms are just that, rooms that you must escape from. They grew out of video games that offered a similar experience but it wasn't until they came to real life that they really took off.

"I imagine that somebody was a little tired of sitting at home alone and thought 'I would like to do this with friends' (or) 'I would like to do this in real life,'" Robinson said.

"It is a lot of fun, it's a lot more tangible than just clicking on a mouse. You get to fiddle with puzzles and move things around."

In order to give people that experience, it took a lot of work and a lot of trips back and forth from the hardware store.

However, when building the room, Robinson and his partner is crime decided they didn't want their exhibit to be just a regular escape room.

They wanted to tell a story.

"We really worked on story a lot. Some of the escape rooms you go into you just get a bit of a back story and then have to solve puzzles," Robinson said.

"We really worked to make it theatrical, so throughout our exhibit when you do certain things (or) solve certain puzzles some video will pop up and give you feedback."

They started in the late naughts in Japan, and in recent years they made their way to Canada. The first room Robinson tried to escape was in Vancouver, where he had to break out of a haunted library.

Now, Robinson doesn't have to go to a different province to find escape rooms.

"It's just exploding here in Edmonton, somebody was telling me there is 16 at the moment and there is three about to open."

For some, escape rooms are a good money-making endeavour. But Robinson's room is free, although donations are accepted. He said he just wanted to give people a unique experience.

If you ever want to experience the red planet, your best bet isn't to look to the stars, but to make your way to a little garage in Edmonton.

But, you better hurry, this particular exhibit will be taken down by the time snow hits the ground.

Robinson's partner needs a place to park.