Escape Rooms | A Game Design Critique
Escape rooms first started off as a very popular video game genre that originated with a flash game by the name ‘Crimson Room’, created by Toshimitsu Takagi in 2004. It involved collecting items, finding clues and solving puzzles to escape the room. With the rise in popularity of this genre, real-life escape rooms came to life, and are considered today, as one of the best experiences to share with friends and family.
Fun fact: The first live escape room was built by the company SCRAP in Japan in 2007, with creator Takao Kato!
For years, people were entertained with non-digital games, and today with the number of digital games available, people still go to try out these escape rooms; this in my opinion, says a lot. The adrenaline rush when the team manages to unlock the room and escape, is so rewarding! Sure, digital games are fun and rewarding in their own right and there are digital experiences that mimic real life situations, but physically being locked in a room with the clock ticking right above you, definitely takes the experience to another level.
Escape rooms make players step outside their comfort zones. It makes them tackle challenges which they have never faced earlier, and this brings an element of surprise to the experience. With no idea of what is about to happen, a player is locked in a themed room with a group of people. They must solve the puzzles, crack the codes, find the clues as a team, and unlock the room before the time runs out! On the surface, it seems pretty straightforward, and doable. At least that’s what I thought when I agreed to try this experience for myself. I was amazed at the amount of fun we had trying to escape. The theme and the story behind every game creates an atmosphere of anxiety and with every second ticking by, the game is designed to keep everyone on their toes at all times.
In a talk at GDC, Laura E. Hall states that puzzles are a very useful technique for moving people forward in gameplay. The puzzles are a vital part of this game, which is why I decided to critique the way they are designed to have an impact on the players and facilitate player participation. Solving them is the key to escaping the room. These puzzles involve either numbers, alphabets, pattern matching and recognition, visual perspective, combinations or challenges designed based on the theme of that particular escape room.
They are designed in such a way that they are not too easy or too difficult, and this ensures that the players never get too bored or frustrated, and everyone in the group ends up having fun. Teamwork is crucial and everyone in the group feels like they are making a valuable contribution. The players here are not competing amongst themselves, but against the clock, with a common goal, and that’s what I think makes this game so much fun.
The players are constantly challenged and this puts them in a state of flow, which is a state you enter when you are experiencing absolute concentration on a task. There are no distractions, the level of difficulty is at the edge of capability, the activities are paced to match the skill level of the group and the experience is intense, productive and exhilarating, which according to Donald A. Norman, in his book titled “Emotional Design”, are some of the conditions required for flow to occur.
When a group enters the room, they are told the story behind it, and are then locked in. The timer then begins and this is when the players must form a strategy. They must ideally split up initially, to find clues as quickly as possible. As soon as one person finds a clue, they must start working as a team to use that clue to solve one of the puzzles in the room. On completing the first puzzle, the clue for the next puzzle is revealed and the game is completed once all the puzzles are successfully solved and the team manages to open the final lock and escape the room.
In my opinion, an Escape room is a great example of a Magic Circle. Everyone in the group is a part of their own social order, one from which non-players are excluded. As stated by Bonnie A. Nardi in, ‘My life as a night elf priest’, “These spaces take us away from work, away from school, away from the ordinary. We enter a smaller, more perfect universe in which satisfaction is not guaranteed, but we gain a pretty good chance of achieving moments of limited perfection.”.
These puzzles are designed to make the player feel “safe”. Similar to what Chris Crawford states in his book, ‘Chris Crawford on Game Design’, the puzzles in the escape room provide the players with dangerous experiences that are absolutely safe. To quote Chris Crawford, “The whole idea of play is to give the player an experience without danger that might normally accompany that experience.”. The players know that even though they are locked in a scary room, they are safe, and this decreases the level of fear, increasing the fun factor simultaneously.
The simplest solution is usually the answer. Sometimes players tend to overthink simple puzzles when the solution is right in front of them. This, added to the fact that everyone in the group comes up with a different idea/solution for the same puzzle, makes things even more confusing. That is why players must remain calm and not get intimidated by the puzzles. They are designed keeping in mind the possibility that the players will fail at them a few times before succeeding, and failing at them is part of the fun. This is another aspect of these puzzles that very few games manage to pull off. When players fail at something, they usually get frustrated. Here, because of the fact that it’s a game in a controlled environment and the stakes are not high, players are actually motivated by their failure, and continue to look for different ways to solve these puzzles, and eventually win the game.
When I went to one of these escape rooms, one particular puzzle stood out amongst the rest. We had solved every puzzle in the room and had to solve just one more to unlock the room. There was a piece of paper kept on the table with lines arranged on, it in a pattern we just couldn’t understand no matter how hard we tried. We finally found a sheet of plastic under the table with similar patterns of lines on it. After a few minutes we decided to stack them one on top of the other. It spelt out “N W S E” which referred to North, West, South and East. The door finally opened when we moved the handle on the lock in these directions. We escaped the room with 2 seconds left on the clock.
We played through the game knowing very well that there was no physical reward if we won. We still had a great time, and that in my opinion is how games should be designed. The player must remain engaged all throughout the game even if the game doesn’t offer any reward at the end. We kept playing through it because we were having fun. It didn’t matter how many times we failed along the way. The puzzles were challenging enough to keep us guessing and running around for clues from start to finish. The sense of achievement we got when we completed it just in time, is something we will remember for years to come, even without having anything to certify it.
Escape rooms are also a great way to get to know people better. In an article by Casey Wright titled ‘Why Escape Rooms Are a Great Way to Test Potential Hires’, he states that he would put his potential hires in an escape room to test if they have the critical thinking skills needed for the job. He says, “In an escape room, I can see if the candidate gets flustered or takes a calm, collected approach to solving the puzzles presented.” It is also a great way of seeing if the candidate is a team player or not. Escape rooms could thus be used as a platform for selecting candidates on the basis of critical thinking, rather than going through fabricated resumes.
The puzzles by themselves are not anything out of the ordinary, but when coupled with the countdown, and the theme of the room, they become so much more interesting and fun to solve. There is exchange of ideas between the players and in my opinion, this social interaction is a big part of why Escape rooms are so successful. The feeling of being part of a team and being able to provide your ideas and suggestions makes for very engaging gameplay that very few games offer.
Varun Sunil Bajaj
