In pictures: Dubai’s Challenge Chambers

Mohammed and Saira Khurram are the couple who opened the attraction last year after a decade of playing similar games on their computers.

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.

The puzzle begins with the four players finding themselves handcuffed in a locked room. Having located the key to release the chains, they gradually learn that they are spies who have been captured suring a vital mission and have just an hour to figure out their escape plan.

Players need to work their way through a succession of clues, puzzles and codes that would eventually lead them to the all-important code needed to unlock the door and escape.

As the hour wore on, a definite team spirit and structure developd. Each player would automatically revert to their developing role in the group and every one of the four 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.

As the players stood at the door after about 59 minutes, clumsily thumping in what they 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 played.

For the record, they 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.

Take a closer look at the live-action, role-playing, puzzle-solving Challenge Chambers at Jumeirah’s Sunset Mall. All photos by Antonie Robertson / The National.