Married couple Lisa and Chris McMillan opened Killer Noob Escapes in Winnipeg in 2020.Supplied
In 2019, Lisa and Chris McMillan were on vacation in Las Vegas when a business idea struck. The Winnipeg couple had just completed an escape room, and while they had fun, they couldn’t help but think about all the ways that the experience could be improved.
“We just could not stop talking about it,” Lisa says. “The sets were fantastic, but we felt like the puzzles were lacking a little bit. We kept on being like, ‘Imagine if they did this’ and ‘What if they did this?’ It was days we were talking about this, and it got to the point where we were like, ‘Why don’t we try it?’”
Though neither one knew anything about building an escape-room business, the McMillans realized they were uniquely qualified to try – and not just because of their long-running love of puzzles and horror. Lisa brought a background in marketing and public relations, while Chris knows all about electrical engineering and contracting. Together, they knew they had the tools to create an immersive experience, one that that dialled up the scare factor and challenged guests with clever brainteasers.
So, they decided to go for it, launching Killer Noob Escapes in Winnipeg in October 2020. The name captures the full player arc: in the world of escape rooms, top-tier players are dubbed “killers,” while newcomers are, in internet jargon, “noobs” a.k.a. newbies.
The McMillans found a space – a 5,000-square-foot warehouse – and built their first two rooms: The Funhouse, which can accommodate four to eight players and involves escaping from a creepy clown named Puddles, and Buried Alive, a two-player game set in an abandoned church in the woods.
“We love mixing hands-on mechanical puzzles, light and sound-triggered interactions and narrative-driven logic challenges, so players feel fully immersed in the world, not just solving locks,” Lisa shares. “Our puzzles range from memory and logic challenges to sequence-based and two-part puzzles that deliver those big ‘a-ha!’ moments.”
Lisa admits that it wasn’t ideal to open their in-person business in the midst of COVID-19 shutdowns. But, defying the odds, Killer Noob slowly gained traction. They now boast nearly 1,500 five-star reviews on Google, and from 2022 to September 2025, their bookings surged by 61 per cent. Their busiest season – October to December – is still to come.
The overarching draw at Killer Noob is the creepiness factor.Supplied
While escape rooms are often pitched as team-building exercises, Killer Noob leans hard into its true selling point: pure creepiness. Lisa has loved all things horror since she was a kid, to the point where one of her childhood goals was to watch every movie in the horror section of her local video store. As an adult, getting to lean into spookiness as part of her job is a dream. “Designing horror-themed sets is just so much fun,” she says.
This love of horror resonates with guests, too. While some of Killer Noob’s rooms are designed with fewer jump scares and easier puzzles, making them better for family outings, others amp up the scare factor and are intended for older guests. The Butcher’s Sins room, for example, is reserved for those over the age of 16. But regardless of patrons’ ages, the rooms must bring a frisson of fear, Lisa notes.
“Our players [are] screaming, they’re laughing, and that’s exactly why horror and suspense experiences resonate with people. They love the shared adrenaline and the safe scare,” she says. “Horror is communal. When people walk out, they’re closer [to each other] than when they walked in.”
What sets Killer Noob apart is that they’re one of the few escape rooms in Winnipeg that offer a two-part experience. The Funhouse now leads to The Upstairs, set in the unsettling upper level of Puddles the clown’s home. Each segment takes about an hour to complete.
It’s something they added based on feedback from customers who just weren’t ready to leave after doing one room. The McMillans are also already working on their next offering, a hybrid of an escape room and a murder mystery. The two-hour experience will start with dinner. Then comes a murder – and group will need to solve an escape room to figure out who committed the crime and what weapon they used.
In fact, the McMillans have many more ideas than they can possibly execute. Some of that limitation is due to time and capacity – Lisa’s professional focus is Killer Noob, but Chris still works another job. But mostly, it’s about making sure each new experience delivers the level of quality that guests expect, and that they expect of themselves.
“Getting to see people engage with [our rooms] is extremely nerve-wracking, because it’s like, ‘Is this as good as I thought it was?’ But then you watch [them] have fun and scream,” Lisa says. “People always talk about it afterwards, in the parking lot or right outside the bathrooms. You can hear that fun feedback and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, we did it again.’”