We tried to 'Escape the Room' in a Ford Escape

What do you get when you combine Escape the Room with a vehicle test drive? It turns out, a lot of fun.

If you’re not familiar, Escape the Room is a real-world puzzle game where teams of users have to follow clues to (surprise) escape a room. It’s fantastic.

This weekend, Ford has partnered with Escape the Room creator Victor Blake to set up an Escape the Room scenario that also acts as a soft sales pitch/test drive for the Ford Escape.

A few colleagues and I partook in the experience – which is taking place at Skylight at Moynihan Station in Midtown Manhattan until June 26 – earlier this morning.

We had a blast.

The experience is set up over a 35,000-square-foot venue. The experience is separated into five different rooms and teams are given six minutes to find clues and escape each room. En route from place to place, you drive along in a 2017 Ford Escape. 

Specific features of the Escape – including its app (which lets you remotely start and unlock the car), its Sync 3 system and its rear-camera – are integrated into the experience too.

It kicks off in a room designed like a New York City apartment and from there, you travel to other destinations, which include a coffee stand (after which, you are instructed to test out the hands-free parking feature), an office place, a party in Bushwick and even a film festival at the beach.

Because you’re only given six minutes to escape each area, plenty of teams won’t succeed. In fact, Blake told me only 20 percent of participants will probably escape each scenario in the allotted amount of time.

For us, we failed at the second room, which was designed to look like a traditional office. Something about file folders, physical books and a desktop PC flummoxed Team Mashable. The irony that an office place took down a group of co-workers wasn’t lost on us.

This is the new test drive

As a promotional experience, Ford Escape NYC is quite effective. Blake did a great job designing a puzzle game that was challenging but that also managed to both use and play up many of the selling features of the 2017 Ford Escape.

Watching Ray Wong park the Ford Escape hands-free was both exciting and terrifying. But mostly very, very cool. As a non-driver, I’m always amazed at how far car tech has come in just the last few years.

Ford is targeting Millennials with this experience, and from what we saw, it has a chance to succeed.

Ford Escape NYC runs through Sunday, June 26.