Front and Center: Clint Sistrunk

An astronaut awakes from hypersleep, disoriented and in the dark, to find that her spaceship has been damaged by a meteor shower. She and the crew have only 60 minutes to power up the escape pod, or they will be pulled into the event horizon of a nearby black hole.

This is not a movie, but it is not exactly real either.

It is a live-action game called an escape room. The experience is now available to Jackson residents, thanks to third-year University of Mississippi School of Dentistry student Clint Sistrunk and his wife, Paulina.

A team of participants enters a theme-based room and is locked in. To escape, players must work together to find clues and solve puzzles. Each mini-game leads closer to the key that opens the door. The goal is to open the door and escape before the timer runs out.

Worldwide, escape-type games are not new. The first escape room was started by the publishing company SCRAP in Japan in 2007, according to a white paper by Dr. Scott Nicholson, a professor of game design and development at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. The games spread from Asia to Europe before reaching the United States. Escape the Room USA claims to have held the first escape game in the U.S. in October 2013.

Sistrunk, a Jackson native who now lives in Pearl, played his first escape room while visiting his future wife in her native Poland after his first year of dental school.

"I knew it was our last summer break, probably forever," Sistrunk said. "I wanted to go see Paulina. So I booked a flight and said I was going to spend my three months of summer just taking it easy.

"When we were planning things to do, she said there is something in Warsaw called an escape room. It sounded interesting, so we booked a room."

After that first experience, he said, they were hooked.

"We played one more that summer and then started brainstorming about bringing it to Jackson."

As classes resumed, Sistrunk focused on his studies, but the idea stayed with them. After their wedding, the couple set out on a honeymoon road trip across the western United States.

"We got married on a Friday and rolled out Saturday morning," he said. "We just got in the car and knew we would end up at the Grand Canyon."

Along the way, they stopped to play escape rooms in Phoenix, El Paso, Austin and Albuquerque, tackling themes like UFO abduction and kidnapping.

"The alien abduction was really cool. It took place in a cellar, an actual basement of a house," Sistrunk said. "It was designed for eight people, but we were the only ones who booked that night. It was tough. There were too many puzzles, and we did not get out."

After returning home, they began building their own business.

"As soon as we got back in January, we hit the ground running," Sistrunk said.

JXN Escape Room opened on Valentine's Day weekend and added a second room about a month later, with a third planned.

"We have two themes right now. One is called 'The Investigation,' where players solve a murder," Sistrunk said. "The fastest time we've had for that room was 48 minutes and 30 seconds. The record for the spaceship-themed room is around 52 minutes."

While one room leans more toward science and logic, no specialized knowledge is required.

"We do not ask you to do differential equations," he said. "The number one thing we have found is communication. Communication is 100 percent of the game."

This emphasis on teamwork has made escape rooms popular for corporate team-building and educational settings.

Sistrunk advises players to share discoveries and work together.

"You never know what is going to trigger someone else's thought process," he said. "We design our rooms to be challenging. Players need to solve a puzzle every six or seven minutes to keep progressing."

To stay competitive, the couple regularly visits other escape rooms for inspiration.

"We write off these games as research," Sistrunk said. "Probably one of the best rooms we have done was in Atlanta, with a haunted hotel theme."

They often travel with fellow School of Dentistry students Ronald Young and Alyssa Swenson.

"We are pretty proud of our team," Swenson said. "We set a record in one Atlanta room at about 40 minutes."

Young said their farthest trip was to Orlando, where they completed a particularly challenging game.

"The room had a 9 percent success rate with 10 people," he said. "We got out with only four people and about five or six minutes left."

And their team name?

"A Team Has No Name," Young said. Game of Thrones fans will understand.