Dubois County couple's escape business plays on French Lick's gangster past

A pair of cement shoes may wait for your friend Harry if you aren't successful. — A pair of cement shoes may wait for your friend Harry if you aren’t successful.

In an hour, investigators will bust down the door to Al Capone’s speakeasy in search of evidence to put him in the slammer, and as a prospective partner with the legendary gangster, you want to prevent that from happening.

But without any information on what they are looking for and only your intuition to rely on, that hour seems like seconds as you and your team work through the clues and puzzles to successfully escape and save Capone.

Or…

Your friend Harry seems to have a squeaky clean life — helping little old ladies cross the street, saving cats from trees and other boy scout-worthy activities. Until you receive a call that Harry took something from some nefarious people and they want it back. Again, with little to go on and only an hour, you have to find what they want and what Harry is involved in to save your friend before he gets a custom pair of cement shoes.

Those are the two scenarios offered by Escape French Lick, a new escape room adventure a Dubois County couple are opening this Friday in the Indiana town famous for visiting gangsters.

Julie and Bob Miller will open Escape French Lick this Friday evening. This Uncle Fester looking fellow will be collecting guns and other weapons at the door to the speakeasy.

Bob and Julie Miller have been planning the new venture for nearly a year. A computer programmer by trade, Bob, 54, has had entrepreneurial interests most of his life but the right idea just hadn’t seemed to come together until the couple’s three daughters led him to the escape room craze.

The couple’s middle daughter Abby told them about taking part in one of the puzzles with her husband’s family and having a great time. Bob didn’t think much of it until he was visiting his middle daughter Abby in Massachusetts last year.

The weather turned bad enough that the usual outdoor activities weren’t available. “We didn’t have anything else to do so we booked a room,” Bob said. “It was a good time for all of us, but when I saw their enthusiasm and their excitement about it, I started thinking.”

When he returned to Indiana, Bob took Julie and his youngest daughter Lydia along with a group of her friends to an escape room in Louisville. The teens had a blast and Bob and Julie could see the potential for a business that would entertain all age groups.

Bob is from Ireland and Julie is from Dubois where the couple lives now. Although they originally thought about Jasper as a location for the business, French Lick’s transient and recreation-driven population seemed to be a better fit. In April, they closed on a building that formerly held the Springs Valley Herald and began renovations.

Julie, 51, a nurse for the past 23 years, was able to tap into her creative side as she developed backstories that fit the French Lick history. “We tried to come up with a storyline rather than it just being a trap that you have to get out of,” she said.

Working scratch with the gangster theme, Julie and Bob planned out the clues, puzzles and locks for the Capone-themed room. Unfortunately, it was too tough at first. “I think we had about a 5 percent success rate,” Julie said. “I had to kind of downscale the difficulty.”

Bob and Julie bought the former Springs Valley Herald building to convert it into their adventure-based business.

The fun of the rooms isn’t centered on successfully escaping, though. For those who aren’t familiar with escape rooms here is a primer. The rooms have various themes and scenarios that play out around the teams as they attempt to escape from a locked room. Some have players starting in handcuffs attempting to thwart an evil plot to launch a chemical weapon or diffuse a bomb. Others take on a more cloak and dagger facade of searching an office for clues to an assassination plot or another scheme.

Teams are put in the room with little instruction other than the scenario’s goals. As a participant in two of these rooms, facing a nondescript office with little to go on other than what little you remember of the briefing is a bit daunting at first.

Teams have to solve clues to find keys or combinations to unlock secure areas of the room to find more clues or other keys. Special hidden messages need to be discovered and deciphered leading the players step-by-step to the successful end. With the hour time limit, it is imperative the teams work together quickly.

The magic happens when you become immersed in the game, and the room becomes your reality for a little while. Successfully working through the puzzles, each a victory on its own, supersedes the need to beat the room. In the end, regardless of whether teams are successful or not, if the story and puzzles are done well, most players will be ready for another shot at an escape.

“The appeal is that we are giving people an experience similar to a video game but it is real, and it is with their friends,” Bob said.

Although the rooms can accommodate teams with up to 10 people, Bob recommends a group of about seven is perfect. However, a pair of couples will have a great time with it as well.

In the future, the couple plan on opening a corporate challenge since the adventures are team-oriented. That could come in early 2017.

For now, Bob and Julie have had nothing but positive reviews from their beta testers so far and are ready for some customer feedback when they open their doors Friday.

Bookings are available at the company’s website http://www.escapefrenchlick.com/. They can be contacted by phone at 812-639-4797 and can be followed on Facebook. Escape French Lick is located at 8582 W. College Street, French Lick.