Escape Artist announces horror escape room just in time for Halloween season

The Upstate’s only independently designed and operated escape room, Escape Artist, will soon be unveiling its largest and scariest themed room to date. It will terrify you.

Dubbed The Starlight Motel: A Horror Experience, this newly designed room concocts a horrifying mix of The Shining meets the Bates Motel, said Will Rutherford, who owns and operates the Escape Room on 209 East Stone Avenue downtown along with his wife, Kim.

“We’ve been planning and designing this experience for over a year now” Rutherford said. “We’ve always wanted to create a scary room and this is it.”

The new feature, aimed at groups of four to eight people, was born from several avenues, both real and from Rutherford’s imagination. While he can’t give away too many secrets, which obviously would ruin the surprise of the room’s concept, many quirks of the experience come from outrageously bad but actual motel reviews.

“For research, I read hundreds of reviews to get a feel for what some of the most unsettling things about staying in a motel were,” he said. “There is definite realism there.”

Rutherford and his wife have been creating haunted houses in their own home for several years, which adds to the scary factor of the experience. The couple has learned how to perfectly combine a love for scaring people with a love for escape rooms.

For those unfamiliar on how escape rooms work, they are like a puzzle that requires players to use teamwork, communication and logic to complete a challenge, making escape rooms ideal for corporate teams looking to engage employees in a unique, fun way. The Starlight Motel is the latest room for the Escape Artist.

“It’s going to be like stepping into a horror movie,” Rutherford said.

About Escape Artist Greenville

Escape Artist Greenville is an entertainment experience that challenges participants’ teamwork, communication and logic to solve cryptic puzzles, crack codes and search for hidden clues. As Greenville’s first and only independently owned and operated escape room, each challenge at Escape Artist Greenville is conceptualized, designed and built by the Escape Artist team, ensuring a unique immersive experience that can’t be replicated at any other escape room. Escape Artist Greenville offers challenges for groups between two and fourteen people, private room reservations, and corporate teambuilding opportunities. For more information visit www.escapeartistgreenville.com.