Whity wants you dead and you must escape Osaka’s most complex shopping area after-hours to survive.

Shinjuku Station in Tokyo often gets the most credit for being a confusing tangle of corridors, train gates, shops, and escalators which would reduce many grown men and women to tears. However, the entwined facilities of Osaka Station, Umeda Station, and Nishi-Umeda station in the Umeda area of Osaka is certainly in the same league.

▼ It’s especially dungeon-like at night

Its disconnected floors, multiple eight-way junctions and lack of any coherent orientation make it nearly impossible to navigate without advance planning. So, its the ideal place to hold the new escape game titled Escape from White City Dungeon.

On 10 March at 1:30 a.m. 100 teams of two will be released in the catacombs of Whity, an underground shopping area of Osaka Station, and given one hour to solve its riddles and escape.

Whity is the name of the shopping mall’s management, but in the reality of this escape game it is the name of an AI which manages a top secret research facility that conducts human experiments. However, the facility has been discovered, and Whity was instructed to self-destruct in 60 minutes.

At this time, all of the test subjects have woken up and must now find a way to decode the security system to stop it from killing them and then escape the area. According to the organizers, the game only has a one percent chance of success, which given the limit of 100 people (two games, 50 pairs each), suggests some sort of elimination process in which only one person can advance the whole way.

If you’d like to take on this murderous shopping center yourself, all you need is a receipt showing that you have spent over 3,000 yen (US$27) at one of Whity’s stores and then submit it, along with an application form, to one of the boxes found inside Whity.

Applicants must be over the age of 18 and the deadline to apply is 14 February. Afterward, those selected will be notified by email. For those unfamiliar with Whity Umeda, here’s a video walkthrough of the area.

It’s sure to be a unique event, turning what is normally the busiest area of Osaka into a deserted playground. If you do manage to get it, I’ll pass on these words of advice my high school chemistry teacher told my class just before graduation: “Work hard, stay strong, and whatever you do, don’t let Whity keep you down.”

I’m pretty sure he was talking about something else, but it fits surprisingly well here too.

Event Information

Escape from White City Dungeon / ホワイトシティ迷宮(ダンジョン)からの脱出

Whity Umeda / ホワイティうめだ

Osaka-shi, Kita-ku, Komatsubaracho, Umeda Chikagai

大阪市北区小松原町梅田地下街

Saturday, 10 March, 2018

Two games from 11:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. and 12:30 a.m. to 3:00 a.m.

Source: Whity Umeda, Hachima Kiko

Images: Whity Umeda

[ Read in Japanese ]