A player searching for clues he hopes will lead him out of a sealed chamber in Wuhan, Hubei province. Miao Jian / For China Daily

Despite the boom in room escapes in recent years, Zhu said the market has become a little saturated and a batch of room escapes might fall by the wayside soon.

"The room escape requires the operators and designers to have a high degree of meticulous arrangements, strategic thinking and planning," said Zhu. "It's like an intelligence competition between you and the customers. No customer would be willing to pay for poor designs."

The craze will lose its attraction to many customers if the operators slow down in coming up with distinctive designs and projects or simply copy the ideas of others, he said.

Some competitors even intentionally inflict damage upon the rooms of others or imitate others' designs. Such improper competition would only lead the market downhill, he said.

Zhu's words are echoed by Cai.

"You have to update the themes and designs of the rooms every month to cater for the increasingly picky and particular tastes and demands of the customers or get weeded out of the market," she said.

In addition to the rent for site use at these very bustling and prosperous downtown districts, the research, development and testing of newly-invented rooms take up a lot of investment and expense, said Cai.

Omega is now cooperating with a team from Tsinghua University to provide more high-tech designs to the game to attract more customers.

All rooms are based on logical reasoning and comprehensive research by the designers from Tsinghua University, who are mostly majoring in engineering sciences and therefore are more suited for the challenge.

"In addition to some classic rooms we would love to retain, we are also constantly coming up with fresh new designs to meet the demands of our challenging customers," she said.

In addition, Omega is considering coming up with specifically designed rooms for English-speaking customers, and has plans to open new outlets soon.

"We have received many English-speaking customers who have shown great interest in the game," she said.

Cai said she believed as more talented people joined the business and brainstormed more ideas and designs for the sealed rooms, more people from all walks of life will be attracted to the intelligence challenge.