New ‘escape room’ business to challenge customers with puzzles, locked rooms

The entertainment trend of escape rooms is coming to Sioux Falls.

Realtor Amy Stockberger and her family are starting Escape 605, a first-of-its-kind business in the city that will challenge customers to solve a sequence of puzzles in order to escape a locked room.

They are planning to open in a strip center at 3718 S. Westport Ave. on Jan. 8 and are building out two elaborately themed rooms “filled with clues, riddles, locks and puzzles,” Stockberger said.

Teams of two to 10 people have to crack the code in 60 minutes or less to unlock the room.

“It is an adrenaline-rushed 60 minutes of everyone working together to decipher all the clues, and it takes a group effort to get to the end result,” Stockberger said, describing the experience as the game of Clue meets the reality show The Amazing Race meets “the most epic scavenger hunt of your lives.”

While escape rooms are growing in popularity nationwide, the most engaged customers have been businesses using the exercise for team building, she said. Escape 605 will offer companies the chance to rent out the rooms in three-hour periods.

Most escape room businesses are start-ups, and most are secretive about their designs for competitive reasons, Stockberger said. She and her husband, Adam, and her brother-in-law and sister, Dustin and Stacy Hoffman, are co-owners and have studied facilities from Asia to Washington, D.C.

“Our rooms will rotate out as demand requires,” she said. “We have tons of mind-blowing, out-of-this-world surprises.”

Gift cards can be purchased and reservations can be booked through the website, escape605.com.

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