WAPAKONETA — A hidden gem in Wapakoneta has officially moved into its new location at the former St. Joseph’s Elementary School building on Lincoln Avenue.
The new location features three to four active escape rooms, with several more in development. Visitors can also find a Nerf gun arena, splatter room, tactical laser tag arena and rage rooms.
Abby McGaughy, one of the staff members that works the front desk, gave a tour of the different rooms and explained the options available to customers.
The Nerf arena has a 30-minute time limit, and visitors can choose their Nerf gun from an armory wall outside the room.
“It’s $16 for 30 minutes. There are color-changing lights in the room, and customers can play their own music on the Bluetooth speaker,” McGaughy shared as she walked through the Nerf arena.
Escape Wapak is located at 1101 Lincoln Ave., Wapakoneta. Customers can book an experience through the website, escapewapak.com, or call 419-567-1992 to reserve a time.
In celebration of its next chapter, the Wapakoneta Area Chamber of Commerce arranged a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Escape Wapak’s open house event on Saturday.
The convenience of the new official space abounds. There are lockers throughout the building to store customers’ things, and the former school provides a blank slate of built-in rooms that can be more easily customized for new story ideas and puzzles.
The splatter paint room is one of the other unique entertainment experiences Escape Wapak offers. For $26, a customer can spend 30 minutes painting a canvas in seven paints with sponges and brushes provided by the staff. The room itself is lit by black lights to create a neon immersive party vibe. Attached to the room is a party space with tables and chairs, as this is a popular activity for birthday parties.
“The move to this space has been years in the making,” McGaughy explained.
Behind the Escape Wapak building in a parking lot, a tactical laser tag experience is available as well. In the style of Call of Duty video games, players can choose a laser gun and compete as a group or against other people. During the Halloween season, staff may also pose as zombies to create another level of interaction in the experience.
Visitors can also reserve time in one of two rage rooms. A rage room is a space where visitors can let go and smash things. Escape Wapak does have an age minimum of 12 for this experience. As part of the $26 per person fee, staff provides a box of smashable items, safety gear and a “rager’s” choice of baseball bat or crowbar. People can even purchase larger things to break, such as TVs or small appliances.
“We have some costumes available because we require people to have their arms and legs covered in these rooms,” McGaughy said.
Going up to the second floor of the building brings visitors to the escape rooms. The escape rooms are coordinated from a control room by “game masters.” These are creative and outgoing individuals who watch the room via camera, give hints and communicate with guests by walkie-talkie. They also set up each room in between groups.
The game master on duty Sunday, Mike Wisener was watching a group figure their way through the Red Dead’s Debt room, a pirate-themed escape room.
“I use a different voice for each room when I interact with the guests. Usually, the groups respond in a corresponding voice and really get into the theme of the rooms,” Wisener said.
Escape Wapak has three active rooms currently, with two more in setup or development. The experience costs $30 a person, and a group has one hour to figure out the puzzles. In addition to Red Dead’s Debt, there is a paranormal-themed room, a popular holiday-themed room called Christmas Crisis and “13,” an interactive psychological horror thriller room.
A new room in development is the Loot Room, a competitive heist experience where players enter the room to solve puzzles and “steal” things of varying values by placing them in their duffels. After a player has finished the experience, the game master will scan the items to tally up their score and place them on a leaderboard.
“The idea was to give people who wanted a competitive experience something they could challenge their friends or family to come in and try to beat their scores,” Escape Wapak owner Gary Adams explained. “Most of our rooms have 12 core puzzles, but the Loot Room will have around 40 for added replayability.”
Adams moved back to Wapakoneta with his wife about five and half years ago and found that there was not much to do during the winter season. They had done an escape room in Denver two years prior, and it was something he was always interested in.
Adams thought of opening an escape room himself.
“What if I did it for the public, run it for six months or so, just as a side hustle,” he shared.
He was curious to see what the feedback would be from such a small community. Adams rented space on the second floor of the Wapa Theater building and created his first escape room. The answer from the community was clear, as it sold out the first two weekends.
Adams then created contacts at Wapakoneta High School in Nikki Barger, the school’s theater director, who suggested several students in the theater program. He was looking for outgoing people who would be creative and able to act out a story for escape room participants, giving clues in character and staying in the storyline. Miles Fullenkamp was another contact that helped them set up their electronics for the rooms.
“Eventually we were renting out the entire second floor of the theater building and at capacity, which led us to start looking for a second or replacement location,” Adams said.
Adams felt that by taking the chance on staying in a smaller community, they would find more success by offering a unique immersive entertainment experience to an untapped market.
On their relocation to the St. Joseph School building, Adams said, it’s been “well received to bring back a hallmark building of the community back to life in a fun and interesting way. People who came to the open house remarked on how they went to school there and were curious to see how we’d used the space.”
Getting through the initial stage of customers not being sure what each room is, the staff have worked hard to make the entertainment accessible for everyone. All of the content, from the puzzles to props in each room, are created in-house. The content is created by a collaborative effort, and the whole team helps with aspects from the story to the design of the rooms and puzzles.
The penultimate goal is that every room in Escape Wapak will fit into an overarching steampunk theme that matches the brand’s design aesthetic. Adams stressed that it’s important that Escape Wapak bring virtual and real together in a playable space.
“Video game culture has become engraved in our culture as gamers age, and new gamers join in, but people still want to have these experiences in real life together with other people,” Adams said.
