Do you ever wonder what kind of fun you can have outside of Madison, SD?  It’s no secret that this wonderful little town of ours doesn’t have much going for it in the entertainment department. Unfortunately, the best way to have fun in Madison is to get out of Madison: destination Sioux Falls, SD.

                 Sioux Falls is only about an hour away from our school, and its no secret a lot of students go there for a night or two away. In fact, a sizeable amount of our students are even from there. The city is a host to several attractions, including the nation’s largest one-story mall, the claim to the largest city in South Dakota, and of course the trademark Falls Park.

                Sioux Falls is also host to a new, rather strange attraction, Escape 605. Escape 605 is a part of the new and upcoming fad: escape rooms, in which participants are placed in a room of riddles and puzzles that they have to solve to escape the room. If you do it in good time, you get immortalized on their leaderboard. However, this is no easy feat. The puzzles and locks you encounter seem manageable for the hour you’re given, then you realize you have 15 minutes left and you’ve already used 2 hints.

                But the most frustrating part of the game by far is the locks, and they aren’t normal locks. Some locks are opened with letters, so you spend the better part of your time overthinking everything you see in the room. For instance, exclaiming “hole!” when you see a hole in the wall and somehow discerning that it’s the key to the lock or when you actually have the correct key but slight the cog just enough to not be able to unlock the next clue. 

                Amidst the difficulties, the reward is all the more worth it. Upon opening the door to your assumed salvation, you feel relieved, as though you were actually afraid of whichever Saw movie you would end up being a part of. The excitement is the attraction, no matter how mundane, so they have merited yet another recommendation.