Thank you for purchasing a ticket to Brain: The Ultimate Escape Room.
Unlike traditional escape rooms, Brain will force you to confront the darkest challenges inside your mind, like whether you should text your ex or listen to Adele’s breathtaking 25 album for the 78th time while shedding tears onto your dying succulent. Your ticket includes a free companion pass for your therapist and this handy pamphlet detailing what you can expect from each level.
Here we go.
Level I: Decision-Paralysis Crosswalk
In Brain’s first level, players must overcome the dread of making decisions by making, well, a decision. To progress, you must walk away with a sense of contentment from your choice, whether it’s finishing that slide deck for your boss or watching people competitively eat cake on YouTube for three hours. Just make the damn decision.
Level II: Jigsaw Puzzles of Your Anxieties
Jigsaw puzzles can be fun, sometimes. But instead of puzzle pieces advertised as choking hazards, we’ve replaced them with your anxieties (emotional choking hazards). Their shapes range from hollow conversations at parties to episodes of hyperventilating that result from sending an email that accidentally includes “your” instead of “you’re.”
Level III: Riddles Full of General Life Dissatisfaction
Riddles are really annoying, so we decided to include them. Some examples include “How many self-help books should I read before I feel like I’m as happy as Oprah?” to more common ones like “I know that eating this entire cake won’t fill the emptiness I feel on the inside, but I’m going to do it anyway.”
Level IV: A Socratic Dialogue with Your Ego
The ego is difficult to conquer, especially when it desires external validation from every atom in the universe. Defeating the ego requires players to learn how to wield powerful weapons, like mindfulness or marijuana.
Level V: A Socratic Dialogue with the Actual Socrates
Only the courageous can endure an onslaught of being asked “why” indefinitely by an old white guy. Please refrain from punching Socrates, who is played by our intern, Randy.
Level VI: Cracking the Morse Code of Your Childhood Memories
This level may or may not be easy, depending on your family’s income bracket. Due to prior customer complaints, we’ve banned racist uncles.
Level VII: Navigating through a Spider Web of Self-Deception
In this level, players must untangle their emotional well-being from the web of stories they tell themselves, spanning from tales that are false to tales that are incredibly false. But don’t worry—you’ll definitely be the next Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Level VIII: A Maze of Self-Loathing
You will struggle with this level unless you’re Oprah. At every corner, familiar maxims of self-loathing will appear on the walls, such as “You’re unworthy of love” and “You really need to stop eating so much cake.”
Level IX: A House of Mirrors That Compares You to More Successful People
This level will provoke insecurity and crying, often both. In one particular challenge, players are asked, “If Vanessa from high school just received a MacArthur Genius Grant and bought a three-story brownstone in Park Slope, at what age will you finally accept that you won’t be the next Lin-Manuel Miranda?”
Level X: Solving the Sudoku Puzzle of Your Inner Monologue
In Brain’s final level, players must learn to silence their inner monologue when it’s a giant, walking sudoku puzzle. But don’t be fooled by Randy’s battered costume — completing this level requires years of therapy and expensive meditation retreats, not competence in berating interns. Victorious players often report elevated levels of happiness, though all agree it’s short lived, just like life.
Enjoy!
Hey! The Bold Italic recently launched a podcast, This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley. Check out the full season or listen to the episode below featuring Aarti Shahani, technology reporter at NPR. More coming soon, so stay tuned!
