Escape Room Reflection
I’m a competitive person. It’s something I openly acknowledge coming from a family where we play board games at the thanksgiving table. As a side note, I’ve wanted to be an FBI Special Agent since I was ~8 (Scooby Doo was a major influence). So, combined, I went into the escape room extremely excited and ready to go. I had my tv-show-based investigative skills and competitive nature and since I had never done an escape room, I was so far undefeated.
I picked the Joker’s Asylum room partly due to time constraints and then partly because it was the hardest room available and I love a challenge. The intro video was interesting to initiate the narrative and set our team up as ‘an elite team of agents’ to save the day, but the illusion was broken a bit when 2 of us had to decide to be ‘hostages’ for the game. Once I was set up in the non-hostage room, everyone started looking in drawers, pressing buttons, reading posters on the walls, and trying to hear what the ‘hostages’ were telling us from their room. Communication was difficult, but that was a part of the challenge.
The first part of the game took us the longest, probably because we were all trying to do everything at once without really consulting each other. Escape rooms are clearly a collaborative game, which I don’t have much experience in, so I had to turn my competitive attitude against the game itself and our goal to beat it. I’ve played an escape room board game before which had some minimal physical elements, but I loved playing in real life. It’s hard to export the experience of running around, feeling around cabinets, turning lights on and off, and interacting with the other room by pressing buttons at the same time. Plus, we opened a WALL that turned into a doorway into another room. That can’t happen when you’re sitting on the couch. Discovery was the biggest sort of fun I experienced. I absolutely love puzzles, and the escape room was like a puzzle of puzzles.
I do have to admit I was pretty happy when I discovered a key clue that opened a door or a box or pieced something together that led us farther in the game, but the game worked so that no single person could win it on their own. Teamwork was a necessity.
Mechanics-wise, I liked the walkie-talkie because it made me nostalgic for times when me and my siblings would run around town communicating only through walkie talkies and code names (pre-smartphone days). Hopefully without sounding too much like the millennial I am, I enjoyed the mechanics that were a bit old-er fashioned like the one way telephone and the walkies.
I did love playing with my team, but I noticed myself getting impatient at times or trying to speed people up because — as previously mentioned — I’m competitive. Not everyone is, and I respect that, but that didn’t prevent some frustration. I noticed a few other players on my team felt the same way and reflected a bit on this later.
This also made me sometimes hesitant to use clues because I’m also stubborn, and part of me wanted us to win ‘on our own’ but then realized that the people who did the best probably took advantages of all the resources they had, like anyone would in a real situation. I wonder how things could’ve worked if everyone on the team was super competitive. It probably would’ve been a nightmare. Maybe it would’ve been super fun. I’ll get back to you when I play with my family!
That is, if I’m still alive after.
