“No, don’t stop, it’s gonna crush my fingers!” I shriek at a friend as I try to push a button hidden in the wall as a black shutter slowly lowers, inches from my hand. My friend is standing inside a shabby Soviet wardrobe, turning the rail like a screw to lift the shutter, while another of my friends is writing down the Roman numerals that light up when I press the button. We translate them into Latin numbers and use the code to open a combination door lock. Fast forward five minutes and me and my friend are trying to guide a little metal ball through a pinball-style maze as another friend behind us is frantically peddling an old exercise bicycle to reveal next puzzle. But as the ball falls into the hole and key falls out, we find out that the door we have been trying to open is fake, and the entrance to the lab is through the secret door in the back the wardrobe. Inside the lab we hastily disarm a bomb and prevent a nuclear disaster. Then we get our coats, pat ourselves on the back and go for frappuccinos.

It won’t be a revelation to say we didn’t disarm any live bombs. Instead, we played a real-life room escape game called The Mystery of Chernobyl, situated in a basement in a dusty residential yard in the centre of St Petersburg. The scenario was staged around the persona of a fictional professor Igor Radchenko, a worker at the Chernobyl plant who mysteriously disappeared just days before the disaster in April 1986. Near the end of the quest, we were in for quite a plot twist, which revealed that Radchenko blew up the Chernobyl plant on purpose, and had planned another explosion for the Leningrad nuclear station — a detailed letter we’d found in the lab explained the rogue professor’s motives. What started out as an investigation of Radchenko’s disappearance turned into a mission to save Leningrad.