A few months ago, I was handed a business card. The card belonged to a character named “Ray Jones”, and it contained fragmented QR codes, strange crosshatchings, bolded letters — essentially, a series of interconnected escape room-type puzzles. Thanks to that card, I called a phone number, I sent an email, and eventually I earned Ray’s trust and a spot on his “crew”. Designed to advertise Stash House’s upcoming escape room, it was one of the most simple and effective marketing tools I’d ever seen.
Last week, at Street Baptism: A Stash House Prequel, I finally got to meet Ray in person.
Street Baptism, designed and directed by Don DeLeon and Tommy Honton, is billed as “a 3-part immersive escape room experience”. In this series of half-hour experiences, which played out over three nights, participants helped Ray Jones navigate three encounters with drug dealers. By solving puzzles, lying to characters, and making a few difficult decisions, we ultimately directed the story toward impressively different conclusions.
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In Chapter 1: The Deal, the main character (played by Sydney Adeniyi) introduced himself as “Terry,” a quiet, nervous drug dealer. He needed participants’ help in negotiating his first deal with Russian dealer Nikolai (Daniyar) — meaning we needed to find ways to butter up Nikolai, talk ourselves into or out of situations, and solve some puzzles while Nikolai wasn’t looking. By Chapter 2: The Hit, set several years later, Terry had grown bolder, and so had his methods: as implied in the title, he was ready to take out his competition. By Chapter 3: The Heist, Terry had adopted the suave persona of “Ray,” and was successfully running his own drug empire. Chapter 3 delivered a beautifully customized conclusion, in which previous and current choices led to personally tailored conversations and drastically different endings.
Although billed as an escape room, actual puzzles were few, and the experience would have worked almost as well without them. Instead, the most intense challenges were deflecting suspicion, hiding objects from sight, and for some, staying sober enough to focus. (Note: While the experiences offered alcohol, I opted to go through sober.) The low number of participants per experience (1 or 2) meant that we were under close scrutiny — and Ray was often slow to help us out of uncomfortable situations. The result was an exhilarating feeling of vulnerability: unlike most escape rooms with actors, the characters were not there to save us.
The structure of each chapter was different, and some chapters were fastened more firmly to the rails than others. Chapter 2, for example, provided very detailed instructions. While we still had room for finesse in how we accomplished those tasks, we were always going to go through roughly the same steps in roughly the same way. Chapter 1, however, left us room to tackle escape tasks as we saw fit, with actors dropping only very oblique, fragmented hints; and by Chapter 3, we were largely in the driver’s seat.
Similarly, Ray’s degree of helpfulness varied by chapter. In Chapter 1, as an inexperienced and frazzled young dealer, he had little to say that wasn’t framed as confusion or fear; but as he grew in competence, his hints became more helpful. This did result in an unfortunate lowering of stakes as the chapters went on — by Chapter 3, his easy handle on the night’s events meant that we were much less subject to panic, and more likely to turn to him for help. Fortunately, Chapter 3’s variety of story choices efficiently counterbalanced his helpfulness, preventing the night from becoming a walkthrough.
In retrospect, it seems unlikely that anyone would fail to “escape” any of the three chapters. This was a story experience, and even if all objectives were uncompleted by the end of the night, everyone probably experienced all the key story points. But that, I think, was the point. Street Baptism wasn’t an escape room: it was a joyful experiment in storytelling. Part Grand Theft Auto, part choose-your-own-adventure book, it nodded toward other genres while belonging to one all of its own. This is something new, and it’s much more than a marketing gimmick: it may be the birth of a new breed of experience.
With an extremely short run in Think Tank’s space, Street Baptism was available only to a limited crowd. But in the event of a remount, go, go, go. Join the story, meet the characters. I can’t wait to see what life has in store for Ray Jones.
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