A local family has been putting together the pieces of a puzzling business.

In a venture that brings a growing national and international trend to the Wilmington area, Cape Fear Escape Room will provide customers with a real-life (as opposed to video) adventure game that requires participants to solve a series of puzzles and clues within 60 minutes to “escape” the room they're in.

The clues and puzzles are interactive and require participants to be observant and cooperate with each other. U.S. television shows, including The Big Bang Theory and The Bachelorette, have featured escape rooms in episodes.

Kim Wilt said her she and her family hope to open their escape room buisiness in Wilmington by the middle of next month. The Wilts discovered the form of entertainment themselves during a visit to Canada this summer.

“We were looking for stuff to do in Toronto. I have two 11-year-olds and a 13-year-old, so it’s kind of hard to find something that’s not too young, not too old. We came across escape rooms,” Wilt said Thursday during an interview in the space the family leased for their version of the game at 5747-A Oleander Drive. “We chose one, and we had the time of our lives … Everyone had a part in it.”

The next day, they begged the owners of the Canadian escape room to let them try their hand at the second adventure offered.

“We brought Steve’s parents -- my husband’s parents -- with us, and they loved it too,” Wilt said. “On the way home we were like, ‘Gosh, if we can do something that three generations participated in, and it was so fun, and there’s 25 of them [in Toronto] that are all doing well, there’s got to be a good business model for that.”

Wilt and her husband have backgrounds in the marketing industry, which have helped them as they work to open Cape Fear Escape Room. The family found a game designer in Romania, one of the parts of the world where the game has proliferated since it started in Asia, to help come up with two rooms and create some special elements. The Wilts also found items for the rooms from the recent Under the Dome prop sale.

The themes they’ve chosen so far for their two rooms are “time traveler,” a game that will incorporate qualities of various decades, and “Cape Fear manhunt,” a murder mystery, she said.

In the 1,800 square feet that the Cape Fear Escape Room occupies on Oleander Drive, the Wilts will also have a meeting room. “We’re hoping for a lot of people to participate, but our bread and butter for this and for most of them are corporate team-building events,” Wilt said.

The Wilts are still working on what their business hours will be, but expect to be offering their escape rooms by appointment for corporate customers Monday through Wednesday, and to the public, including families and large groups, the rest of the week. The cost is expected to range between $20 and $30 per participant, Wilt said.
 
“We’ll tell you a story about why you’re doing this and what your goal is, and we hope to immerse you in that theme,” she said of the venture's two rooms.

Describing the family's goals for the business itself, “We want it to be good, we want it to be first and we want it to set the standard.”