'Murder intrigue' and dragon boats help companies rally employees in Singapore
'Murder intrigue' and dragon boats help companies rally employees in Singapore · CNBC

I'm standing face to face with a severed human hand in a plastic jar.

To my left is a convincing human foot, resting uncomfortably and covered in blood. In the jar to my right is somebody's ear.

The dismembered body, arranged meticulously in several containers on a shelf, is fake. But for a brief moment, it's dark enough to make me believe otherwise.

I have to escape.

I'm inside "Escape Hunt" Singapore, one of the many "Escape the Room" experiences that have popped up across Asia in recent years.

This was my first experience inside an Escape Room and owner Benjamin Tan is explaining how it works.

"It's a wide variety of puzzles," he says.

"It ranges from physical puzzles to intellectual puzzles, color combinations, numbers, and all sorts of interesting mechanisms!"

He's not wrong.

When you come to Escape Hunt, you're locked inside a series of connecting rooms for 60 minutes. You role play as a Sherlock Holmes character to solve various mysteries and puzzles.

It's a strange and very unique way for a business to entertain staff and clients. But it works.

Abigail Kua, 17, and her friends are repeat customers. She says she made it through the first door before she had to ask for help.

"I felt very tight for time, you really don't know what's happening inside - it's very random," she laughs.

"It's really fun though, it's really challenging to find the clues. It's great, people have to communicate with each other to work together."

Tan was inspired by the Escape Room concept during a trip to Bangkok in 2013 and decided to bring the idea back to Singapore.

Since then, he's tailored the experience for large companies and government agencies, and insists business is booming.

He says the demand for corporate experiences in Singapore is so strong, his business has been profitable from day one.

Tan tells me the competition for Escape Rooms is healthy in Singapore, so he's considering ways to future-proof his business in the experience economy.

He's right, I think to myself. You can't bank on repeat customers if the experience inside the room stays the same.

"Whatever we do in the rooms is still in the typical space. What we are looking at is virtual reality in the room or augmented reality in the room, that would take it one step further,"

How close are you to that? I ask.

"Pretty close," he says with a smile.

Real Estate Professional Manita Bidaud also recognized a gap in the experience economy and decided to launch SingExperience in 2011.