Mystery Mansion offers in-person and online thrills

BY CAROL TODD

Boo, eh!

It’s creepy and it’s spooky, Regina’s Mystery House is eerie and amazing. Online or in person, there’s excitement and escapism, and mysteries and puzzles, to intrigue young and old.

Mitch Bresciani, one of the five co-owners, and the house manager, says the mysteries appeal to more than just avid gamers and people who like to solve puzzles online. “Since we’ve been developing, our demographic has really opened wide up. We’ve had people who’ve never been to an escape room and didn’t think they’d like it. They come in and they try it and say, ‘I’m hooked now.’ The majority of people that we see are a younger age group, but our age group ranges from 12 to 60 years old,” he says.

The Mystery Mansion, which opened in August 2017, was the (super)natural extension to the Dead Zone Haunted Maze, the haunted house that Bresciani and other Mystery Mansion owners operated for about two years at Hallowe’en. “We talked about really enjoying scaring people and the horror aspect of it, so we really wanted to do a different take on these escape rooms and bring the theme of scary escape rooms to Regina,” Bresciani says.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic had a silver lining for the Mystery Mansion operators. While it affected

Regina’s Mystery Mansion immerses participants in story-based experiences, whether you play in-person or online. SUPPLIED

the in-person attendance, Bresciani says it also sparked the online mysteries that are now a big part of the Mystery Mansion experience. “One positive thing to come out of the pandemic was we developed three rooms now that are online only,” he says.

Bresciani says the quality of the online experiences is such that the Mystery Mansion has been recognized internationally. “Our games have been rated very highly world-wide with companies that have played over 600 games which is really, really cool. We are really happy about that,” he says.

There are numerous Mystery Mansion experiences to enjoy in-person now that the COVID restrictions have been eased, with Bresciani saying they are leaving more time between bookings to allow for sanitizing. And the online experiences continue to go strong, including the onlineonly rooms, which are live avatar games, where there is a live host who’s providing the video feed. “Not many places have actually switched to creating them from scratch. We are one of those companies that has gone ahead and done that,” Bresciani says.

Whether online or in person, Bresciani says the Mystery Mansion experiences are different from other similar offerings. “We focus on the story line. We don’t tend to do a one-off room when it’s just one room that tells the entire story; we like to have a mini-series, where you have each room connected,” he says. One of the in-person mysteries is the two-part Detective’s Office, where participants try to find out what happened to a detective who disappeared in 1951. Among the online offerings are the aptly named ‘Night Terrors’ as well as the comedic ‘Drag Queen Task Force’. “So we have different story lines that you can follow,” he says.

In addition to sparking the online offerings, the Mystery Mansion is also enjoying what Bresciani calls the “binge culture” that was encouraged by the virus pandemic. One downside to the pandemic has been the decline in trivia competitions, which Bresciani was hosting prior to the onslaught of the virus. The Mystery Mansion currently offers the trivia competitions for corporate bookings or small gatherings.

Visit mysterymansionregina. ca or the Facebook page for more information.