Reflection: Joker’s Asylum (escape room)
It was the first time that I played an escape room. Knowing that Joker’s Asylum was the most difficult escape room at Omescape made me panic for a second, but the stress eased away when we got into group and started watching the introductory video. After all, struggling in a group could never be worse than struggling alone (well it could be worse, but fortunately I had amazing teammates who knew how to deal with escape room).
The short introductory video gave a clear goal of the escape room — rescuing two hostages and finding a way out. It was nice to learn the context for the story scene that we were going to enter. I was not very interested in the theme, but I subconsciously accepted the storyline and the role assigned to me. As we entered the room, everyone started looking around and checking on the surroundings, I suddenly felt the urge to join my teammates to search for clues. There was certainly a sense of fellowship here when we all worked towards the goal of solving puzzles and rescuing hostages.
Some clues were more obvious than others. I found it frustrating yet hilarious when I realized how many clues I missed. I touched the wall along the edge outside the iron door, but accidentally missed the middle area as I almost kneeled down to the ground and was touching the lower area. At the end, we found there were three buttons in the middle area after getting some hints from the room masters.
The journey of searching for clues was a repetitive debate about whether an object was a clue not. In the beginning, everything seemed like clues, though I quickly went down to the stage where I questioned all the objects that I saw. When I saw a poster of a man’s portrait, I thought the nose and the mouth or mustache looked like letter “L” and “E” (yes they were actually letters…). But I thought it was just a coincidence!
Finding the right clues may not directly lead to the correct answer. Often time a small puzzle was embedded in a higher-level puzzle. It was like a chain, opening up one unit of the chain does not guarantee the following success. It was even more difficult to draw connections between the clues, at least to a beginner like me. Hints from the room masters were really helpful when we got really stuck. We tried not to ask for too many hints, since the fun of the escape room was about looking for clues.
I have not played a lot of games in the past. Building weird constructions and wondering in the middle of nowhere are probably my favorite things to in a game, so my all-time favorites are games like Minecraft and the Sims, which allows a (seemingly) high level of freedom to experience surrealism and seriously mess up with things. There are still constraints, for instance, I cannot build a cylinder building in the Sims without “hacking” the game, but I don’t feel the presence of constraints unless I begin to try to break certain rules.
But playing in the escape room was a whole different experience, the constraints were vividly in front of me, which sometimes disconnected me from the game experience. I could not open the cabinets because they were sealed or locked. I could not damage anything as the rule has been addressed before we played. Sometimes I wish that the escape room could be made more natural and less “artificial”.
