Escape room Reflection

I’ve experienced two other escape rooms before, and it was really interesting to compare them with the Kingdom of Cats game.

Play

Something that this particular room did particularly well was using physical elements to create a sense of play. We were asked to crawl through holes, climb ladders, sniff things, and use the room layout to solve puzzles and navigate the rooms. This made the room feel high-effort and sold the fantasy, compared to another room that I played which felt more like an office space with puzzles inside. I think a key element of the fun was that it was transgressional; it asked us to take actions that we would never do normally. The game definitely would not have made sense as a board game or even a video game because of these very physical tasks.

Puzzle and Narrative

Some of the puzzles of the Kingdom of Cats escape room were very thematic. I especially remember the final puzzle, which asked the players to match scents between two different sets of containers. I felt that this perfectly encapsulated a challenge that would be posed from a cat to a human. Other puzzles similarly asked the player to use their senses of hearing and touch to solve interesting puzzles. However, some of the puzzles were solvable accidentally (I mashed buttons and the gate opened), while some other puzzles felt extremely difficult to solve. That brings us to:

Hints

Our game master was very helpful with his hints; whenever we felt we were stuck, we would call him over the walkie-talkie and describe how far we got, and he would give us a hint. However, I think I actually preferred the voice-of-God style hints I had experienced in another room, where people were monitoring us as we played, and would give us hints if they felt we were sufficiently stuck. In the Kingdom of Cats game, it almost felt like we weren’t capable/we were giving up to ask for a hint.

Inclusivity

It was interesting to see the game in light of other discussions about inclusivity that I’ve been looking at online. For example, making a game inclusive for people who are colorblind is a relatively simple matter in most video games. However, this escape room would be impossible for anyone who is mobility impaired, but it would also detract significantly from the experience to make it simply a series of rooms connected by doors. So it feels to me like this is one of those questions where it just isn’t possible to have a predefined correct answer? I am thinking about this mostly because the new Pokemon Let’s Go game requires motion controls, which is certainly an intentional design decision to capture the kinetic feeling of Pokemon catching, but also signifcantly detracts from many people’s experiences, especially those who can’t move their arms as freely.