Everything is interactive these days, thanks to video games and the Internet, even Neil Patrick Harris’s forthcoming autobiography, which is being written in the style of a 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure book. One of the most interesting fusions of digital culture with an older form — in this case, theater — is the escape room, which locks people behind a closed door and asks them to find a way out.

In these live-action games — the creators insist that they are games first, rather than immersive theater — there are no Houdini-style bindings for the friends or strangers who agree to be trapped together, just puzzles to solve and codes to crack. And the door is opened after an hour even if the players are stumped.

But you’re apt to find yourself racing the clock anyway, trying to decipher clues to reveal the combination of a lock that opens a chest that hides photographs that contain hints on how to read a map that leads to another mystery within another mystery within another mystery.