Escape Room Reflection: Kingdom of Cats
Our team of six people embarked on a quest to escape the Kingdom of Cats. In the very beginning, our gamemaster ushered us into a room where they showed us an intro video. The video provided a backstory to the history of the Kingdom of Cats and why we were escaping it. The storyline was that we adventured into the Kingdom of Cats at the same time when some competition was happening. For some reason, the cats wouldn’t let us leave without completing their challenges. While I personally did not find the plot particularly compelling, it’s the first time I’ve seen an intro video as part of an escape room and it successfully set a mood of anticipation. After we watched the video, we exited the room and crossed the outside hallway into another room. A possible improvement would be to show the video in a room directly linked to the escape room. This way the experience of being immersed by the intro video isn’t broken by walking across the hallway.
The room itself was split into 4 main sections, the starter room, the fireplace room, a hallway, and the final room. Each section had their own main puzzle for us to solve. Each of the puzzles was linked to a cat character. The narrative was that each cat character set a puzzle. In the starter room, there was actually a sheet which outlined the four main puzzles we would be encountering. Some of the puzzles felt more generic, involving UV light, identifying hidden pictures, or symbol matching. In my opinion, the most interesting puzzle was the smelling puzzle. This puzzle was set up where there was a series of 10 vases in the final room and 4 vases in a small crawlspace off of the final room. All of the vases had a specific scent. Our task was to identify the vases in the final room which matched the scents of the 4 vases. It was extremely interesting how they managed to engage the sense of smell, a sense which is often overlooked in game design. Also, they tied it into the cat theme by letting us know in the puzzle intro that cats have a great sense of smell.
For me, the escape room provided an experience of fun through challenge, fellowship, and discovery. Out of these three, I valued the sense of fellowship the most. When you’re in an escape room with a team, you have the opportunity to see the strengths of every individual player. Since the puzzles are different, people have various opportunities to shine. For example, on the final puzzle, we were all pretty stuck. Then, one of our team members identified the numbers each card represented related to the number of vertexes (or edges?) in the figure on the card. Prior to this, most of us were thinking about solving the puzzle through arithmetic sequences or operations. Having a person who could offer a different way of thinking to the majority was the key to cracking the final puzzle.
