Room Escape Artist

“Hey! RIOT!”

Location: Utrecht, Netherlands

Date Played: October 17, 2025

Team Size: About 125 people play at once. You can book alone or with others.

Duration: 3 hours

Price:  from €69.99 per player (Our booking time was €84.99 per player.)

Ticketing: Public

Accessibility Consideration: All players need to stand and walk during the experience, including walking up and down stairs. It helps to be agile if you need to move stealthily, but you can escape without any specific physical skills. Contact Prison Escape about specific accessibility accommodations.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

Talk about a glow up. When we visited Prison Escape in 2018, it was incredibly cool… but so much less dynamic, and far more punishing to players who didn’t find the rails.

In 2025, it had evolved into an expansive, frenzied, and open-ended world that was filled with pre-written opportunities, and the ability for players to create nearly any outcome that they were willing to commit to. Structured as a cinematic escape from prison, we were onboarded by being bussed into an actual prison complex. We were greeted by stern guards, had our belongings taken away, and given prison uniforms.

After processing, we were lined up in the yard with more than 100 other players, where a cruel warden welcomed us to our new home.

From there we were brought to our cells, and that’s when the escape began.

Like during our visit in 2018, this was no escape room. It was a living, breathing world. The challenges before us were physical and social. We had to sneak, steal, talk, and blackmail our way out. The only limits were our imaginations and our ability to sell our story to the guards and staff. I’ve yet to experience a more open world in an immersive show that is readily available to anyone and everyone.

And that’s the thing about Prison Escape. It isn’t some tiny, niche experience that runs a few shows here and there for lovers of immersive theater or larp. They ran 280 shows with an average player count of 125 participants in 2025. Roughly 35,000 people walked through their steel doors last year. They pulled this off by adding so many incredible accessibility features to make every player who needed the support as comfortable as possible in this intense and chaotic environment.

Beware, Prison Escape is typically run in Dutch. They ran 22 shows in English in 2025, so be sure to book that version if you aren’t a Dutch speaker.

For the right player, Prison Escape is an infinite playground… and for those who are more socially timid, they have some wonderful options to help you experience their world without absorbing the intensity head-on.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Story seekers
• Scenery snobs
• Prison break fans
• Any experience level
• Players who don’t need to be a part of everything
• Players who enjoy character interaction

Why play?

• Each player has an incredible amount of agency and relevance
• A small army of performers breath life and near endless opportunities for play into the world
• It’s set in an actual retired mental observation center
• It was an overwhelming improvement over the 2018 version

Story

We were all new inmates at the Pieter Baan Center, a prison in Utrect. We were bussed inside of the walls of the detention center, processed, and set began our new lives under incarceration with only one goal: escape.

Setting

The Pieter Baan Center was an actual psychiatric observation center, which is functionally a prison with more doctors. While the building has been retired from its original purpose, it looked and felt exactly like a prison because it was one.

Prison Escape was able to make modifications to the building which was especially relevant in the third act. These changes created so many opportunities for exploration and play.

Accessibility

Prison Escape has added a lot of affordances that make the experience more approachable for less experienced or nervous players.

The buddy option (designated with stickers) allows two players to travel through the experience together, essentially as if they were one prisoner. We generally saw this in play if one person didn’t really feel comfortable engaging, and the NPCs would interact with the more engaged player, as the two moved through the experience as a unit. If you don’t want to go at it alone, you don’t have to.

As part of intake into prison, we each received a water bottle . These weren’t cumbersome; the water bottle fit into a pocket of the prison jumpsuit. We all appreciated having water easily accessible over the 3-hour game.

We were playing the English version of the game, which Prison Escape runs periodically to accommodate international players. However, Prison Escape welcomes players who don’t speak Dutch even when the experience is fully in Dutch. The NPCs will switch to English for individual interactions. Like with the buddy system, they use stickers to help the NPCs recognize non-Dutch speakers.

Players with mobility concerns could also work out accommodations with Prison Escape.

In-world Onboarding

In my memory of the original version, the onboarding took a lot of time. Prison Escape has streamlined this immensely.

All players receive a safety briefing outside the game world, very clearly before entering the Magic Circle.

Through a series of different onboarding scenes (on the bus, prison intake, and a yard scene), we acclimated to prison and learned how to interact in this world. By varying the setting and format, the onboarding never dragged.

After we put on the jumpsuits, our role in the world changed. The costuming did a lot to bring the experience to life.

Prison Caricature

Prison Escape offered an over the top, cinematic representation on prison. It was a caricature. It felt like what DARE told us high school would be like, with huge amounts of drugs offered freely.

This staging gave us the freedom to be silly. It was in no way pretending to be a real prison experience. It was a stylized version of prison, designed as a playable interface.

In fact, Prison Escape Utrecht took place in a former psychiatric center (not exactly a former prison as we’d experienced in the 2018 version of Prison Escape in the Koepelgevangenis in Breda, but close enough.) Prison Escape Utrecht had made some modifications to the building to facilitate play, and also took inspiration for their plots from the setting.

Guided But Open-Ended

Prison Escape offered all players pre-designed paths to freedom that they could latch onto. Led by NPCs, these plots had set goals (i.e. make and detonate a bomb) and the NPCs would guide players toward the materials and information they needed to succeed at these plots. Still, as players, we had the freedom to make these plots our own, coming up with our own social engineering tactics. It was simple enough to hop onto a plot train and ride it through most of the experience.

However, Prison Escape didn’t require players to choose from a set menu of escape plots. We were free to chart our own path through the experience with the resources we found. Everything was in play. We could improvise our own creative paths out of prison.

Stages of Play

Prison Escape Utrecht had multiple stages of play, each as gates for us to pass.

The first checkpoint was manufacturing a distraction that would move us from the prison cells to our escape route. Other players latched onto plots with different tactics in this first stage.

Later check points included finagling our way past a guard, and then maneuvering through our escape route. Again, players had complete freedom with how they approached these obstacles.

The checkpoints kept all the players on rails, at least to a degree, in a largely open-ended experience. They also keep the actors on time in a complex and chaotic world with staged scenes colliding with player actions and plots whose key moments are narratively intertwined.

Confusion vs Opportunity

Prison Escape is not for everyone. You have to make your own way through the experience. There are easier or harder paths, but you have to choose one. Prison Escape won’t do this for you.

The open-endedness of the world, and the variety of NPCs, spaces, and props offer tons of visible opportunities to creative players.

On the flip side, the options can be overwhelming, and some players feel paralyzed by options. Make your choice and stick to it. The only bad choice is trying to see every plot. If you’re a player who suffers from FOMO, know that you won’t be able to see everything and that’s ok. You can come back and follow another plot.

To thrive at Prison Escape, you have to be comfortable interacting with NPCs. If you aren’t, it’s best to move through the experience with others who are. You don’t need an official buddy – just stick with a small group of people you can get connected with by choosing a plot early on.

“Escape” is literal in Prison Escape. But this is not an escape room. If you are looking for puzzles of the traditional escape room variety, this will not be your experience. The puzzle here is how to accomplish your goal with the NPCs and props at your disposal. You’ll thrive if you like improv and social engineering.

Prison Escape is a chaotic behemoth. Some people will find themselves floating aimlessly or overwhelmed, which can lead to feeling confused and lost. Others will thrive in this environment, finding it exhilarating and freeing. It’s an unusual game that hands you a playground of opportunities, and lets you make your own way.

Souvenir Mugshot

It seems silly to love the mugshots, but these are fun to have and to share with each other.

Tips For Visiting

• Meeting Point: The meeting point is not where the game takes place. Come to the meeting point 15 minutes before your ticket time. You will go by bus from there to the game. The meeting point is near Vaartsche Rijn train station, and the easiest way to get there is via public transport at Briljantlaan. Vaartsche Rijn station is only one stop away from Utrecht Central.
• Staying in Utrecht: If you’re staying in Utrecht, the Moxy Hotel is the closest option. However, trains run regularly from Utrecht Central to Amsterdam, so its easy to get back to Amsterdam after playing Prison Escape.
• Logistics: Once you get into the game, you will have the opportunity to store your belongings and use the restroom.
• Language: While this game is usually run in Dutch, there are select English sessions available to book.
• Replayability: Prison Escape is replayable. Each time you play, you can join a different plot, meet different NPCs, and dream up a different scenario to get yourself out of prison.
• Prison Escape has an extensive FAQ if your question is not covered here.

Book your hour with Prison Escape Utrecht, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.