The alarms start to sound. Time is running out to find the rock with the Chorotega king’s spirit trapped inside. We’ve been looking for it for almost 60 minutes in an apartment surrounded by enigmas and surf boards. Right now, they are screaming at us in the doorway to come out with our hands up.
It sounds like a Harrison Ford movie, but we are in a room of riddles and tension called the Treasure of Matambú, the first escape room in Guanacaste.
Maxime Viellard, the manager, is the one screaming at us. He is a 26-year-old Frenchman who wears an Indiana Jones hat. He is the one who gave us the instructions with a contagious excitement and made us feel like the game had already started without having placed a single foot in the room.
He designed the room himself from scratch at 14 years old. His magic is a combination of adolescente imagination and his experience with chess and board games that he grew up playing.
When we arrived, he gave us a brief summary of what we would find inside, where we shouldn’t waste time looking for clues and what to do if we have a problem.
As we walked into our own seclusion, he tells us a little about the theme that surrounds the place. The story of the treasure of Matambú is a combination of Chorotega culture and surfing, a stand-out sport in Guiones. He says that this is the only escape room in the country to include Costa Rican themes.
If I would have been told four years ago that I was going to make a living making people solve riddles in a room, I wouldn’t have believed it.” Max Viellard, manager.
Once inside, Max wishes us luck and slammed the door behind us.
Many of the riddles are solved with numbers and codes, so language isn’t a barrier to playing.Photo: César Arroyo
Inside
For obvious reasons, we can’t give away many details about the Treasure of Matambú. But we can say that every challenge involves lots of symbols and numbers, which makes the game much more universal.
While 60 minutes seems like enough time to solve a problem, the minutes fly by when the mind is working against the clock. They decided not to put a clock inside the room in order to not distract players. They substituted it with an alarm that sounds every 10 minutes.
Max and his partners have been gathering experience solving other escape rooms in Costa Rica and abroad. They have applied what they like and improved what they don’t like. Their ability to learn quickly has them on the verge of opening a second room in the same building here in Nosara, just six months after having started.
A New Challenge
In the month of July, Nosara Escape is opening Plasma Reaction, a new room inspired by the work of Costa Rican astronaut Franklin Chang-Díaz with completely different challenges.
If you want to try something completely different than the conventional Guiones tourism, Nosara Escape opens every day of the week from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the cost of $25 per person, or ¢10,000 for Costa Rican citizens.
It can be done in groups of two to seven people and there is no minimum age requirement, just an open mind and creativity.
If you would like to reserve a space you can call: 8661 7673.
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