Escape the room in Dubai’s role-playing live-action Challenge Chambers

Challenge Chambers is a real life escape the room live-action, role-playing, and puzzle-solving adventure in Dubai's Sunset Mall.

From left (clockwise): Chris Newbould, Lauren Steadman, Shane Mcginley, and Gulnara Newbould try to figure out a Challenge Chamber mysteries. Antonie Robertson / The National

Last week, myself, my wife, and two good friends were enjoying a pleasant evening in Jumeirah’s Sunset Mall when we found ourselves quite unceremoniously captured, handcuffed, and thrust into a locked room where we were informed we had an hour to escape before our captors returned and, not to put too fine a point on it, brutally killed us.

Ordinarily, this would have put something of a dampener on an otherwise pleasant evening. Luckily, this was Challenge Chambers – Dubai’s very own live-action role-playing, puzzle-solving, dungeon experience.

And even if we failed, the chances of permanent, irrevocable death seemed slim after meeting the decidedly un-homicidal Mohammed and Saira Khurram, the couple who opened the attraction last year, after a decade of playing similar games on their computers.

Saira says: “We just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to do this in real life, not on a computer?’ There are some similar events in Japan, but they’re stadium-sized. We’ve brought it to a level where friends can do it together.”

Saira writes all the stories for Challenge Chambers’ four different rooms, some of which allow players to choose between two different scenarios, ensuring a return visit is always an option. Mohammed creates all the puzzles.

“I’m a chartered accountant by trade, so I’ve always been good with numbers and puzzles,” he says. “And I’ve been married to Saira for 10 years, so my life has been one long puzzle, really.”

He might find himself locked in one of the rooms himself after cracking a joke like that, but for now it was up to me and my fellow players to solve the puzzles and free ourselves from captivity before it was too late.

Of course, it’s hard to review an event where one can’t really reveal too much about what happens without spoiling the surprise for future visitors, but here goes.

The puzzle began with the four of us finding ourselves handcuffed in a locked room. Having located the key to release our chains, we gradually learned that we were spies who had been captured during a vital mission and if we couldn’t resolve the mystery behind our captivity within one hour, well, the prognosis wasn’t good.

We had to work our way through a succession of clues, puzzles and codes that would eventually lead us to the all-important code needed to unlock the door and escape.

I won’t go into the details of specific clues or offer any hints and tips, but what was interesting was that on first arriving in the room, we ran around like headless chickens. We looked under every table, chair and in every cupboard, and slowly discovered what might have been clues – or pointless red herrings designed to waste vital ­seconds.

As the hour wore on, a definite team spirit and structure developed. We would each automatically revert to our developing role in the group and I think every one of the four of us solved at least one vital piece of the giant puzzle through his or her own role in the group dynamic. It’s the kind of thing that corporate HR departments looking for great team-bonding sessions would go crazy for, but equally fun (and less likely to require a risk-assessment from head office) as four friends locked in a room try, with growing levels of intensity, to work the whole thing out.

There were moments of frustration: “We’ve already used that. It’s worthless now.”

There were moments of joy: “It only looks like this if you hold it like that...” “Aha.”

There were moments of bewilderment: “This fictional spy who was caught before us and escaped – how did he have time to leave all these ridiculously cryptic clues and still escape? Couldn’t he just have left the door code on a Post-it note?”

As we stood at the door after about 59 minutes, clumsily thumping in what we were sure was the final code with time rapidly running out – a big clock in the corner of the room and an increasingly frantic soundtrack highlighting our incompetence – the adrenalin pumping through our veins seemed comparable with anything a theme park, bungee jump or a football match (discounting those involving Manchester City) have to offer. It also exercised the brain a lot more than those activities.

For the record, we escaped – something the owners informed us only one in 20 groups manage without hints (which are always available if you get stuck but I’d taken a unilateral decision not to allow us to ask for them) – after 59 minutes and 53 seconds.

If any international spy agencies are looking for a new recruit, I assume you know where to find me. Otherwise, I’d gladly go back and try out the other rooms and puzzles on offer at Challenge Chambers.

• Challenge Chambers is open from Sunday to Wednesday, 10am to 9pm and from Thursday to Saturday, 10am to midnight. Prices are from Dh75 per person. Visit the Challenge Chambers website for more information.