The Escape Game has planted its second Valley flag at CityScape in Downtown Phoenix, opening five new 60-minute puzzle rooms at its CityScape location. The venue, located at 11 West Washington Street, Suite 100, is open daily from 8 a.m. to midnight and arrives just over two months after the Nashville-based company's first Arizona location debuted in Gilbert.
The Phoenix venue officially opened to the public on October 5, according to Downtown Phoenix Inc. As reported by KTAR News 92.3 FM, the five rooms feature movie-quality sets, custom props, and layered puzzles that groups have an hour to solve. Jonathan Murrell, the company's co-founder and chief marketing officer, said the team looks forward to welcoming Phoenix-area customers and creating memorable experiences, per the station's report.
Five Rooms, Five Worlds
The lineup includes Timeliner: Train Through Time, which sends players on a time-traveling train journey across multiple centuries to fix a catastrophic mistake, and Cosmic Crisis, a space-station mission to retrieve antimatter and stop a black hole from swallowing the solar system. Ruins: Forbidden Treasure drops groups into a jungle search for a long-lost fortune, while The Depths centers on an underwater investigation into what went wrong aboard a sunken laboratory, the same account notes.
Rounding out the offerings is Murder with a Side of Meatballs, a non-escape format in which players sift through physical clues and a digital investigation board to identify which of seven suspects committed a murder at Rosso's Ristorante. The game marks the format's first appearance outside Nashville, having made its initial Arizona debut over the summer, according to Fabulous Arizona.
From Nashville Workshop to Downtown Phoenix
The Phoenix venue's rooms were created at The Escape Game's 60,000-square-foot production studio in Nashville, known internally as The Adventure Factory. The company has more than 60 locations nationwide. The Escape Game was founded in 2014 by Mark Flint, Jonathan Murrell, and James Murrell, with Flint reportedly inspired to start the company after booking a family escape room visit in London, according to Forbes.
Before landing in Downtown Phoenix, the company tested the Arizona market with a 3,100-square-foot, five-room venue at Heritage Marketplace in Downtown Gilbert, which opened on July 31. That Gilbert Road location, reported by AZ Big Media, established the brand's initial footprint in the state two months before the downtown Phoenix launch.
A Growing Tenant Mix at CityScape
CityScape is a 1.2 million-square-foot, $900 million mixed-use development spanning three city blocks in Downtown Phoenix, built on land that once included Patriots Square Park, with its first phase completed in 2010, according to a Wikipedia entry on the complex. The development also houses office tenants.
CityScape's retail mix includes restaurants, food shops, and entertainment outlets.
