My friends and I are what you would call “escape room connoisseurs”, by which I mean that we obsess a little too much over the intricacies of room’s design when we play one. We are constantly searching for the next experience that we will mark as our favourite. There are so many elements that contribute to the quality of a escape room: narrative, puzzle design, thematic décor, and technological features, to name a few. We knew that it was no small feat to design a great experience, but we had no idea how much work was actually involved until we had to do it ourselves.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of an escape room, you and the rest of a group are locked in a room containing a variety of puzzles, with the ultimate objective of escaping the room by finding a key or switch to open the door. (For safety purposes, you’re not actually locked in — and there is always a method to contact a staff member in cases of emergency.) The experiences typically last an hour and are themed, such as a haunted library or an underwater city. Immersion is highly emphasized, and some facilities will go to great lengths to make the experience as memorable as possible, including dressing up actors in costumes to play certain roles within the game. And because of the amount of work and technology needed to bring the rooms to life, escape rooms often cost tens of thousands of dollars to build.
In spring of 2022, Escape Manor hosted an Escape Room Design Competition. The objectives were to create a theme, write a narrative, and design an experience, complete with puzzle details and implementations. A couple of friends and I jumped at the chance, forming a team that we named Heisterics and submitting an entry form to the competition. The three of us were escape room veterans, and we each had a background in some form of engineering or design — “D” studied architecture in university, “T” studied biomedical engineering, and I had studied electrical engineering before doing grad school in biomedical as well. We all saw this as our chance to contribute to the games that enthralled us for so long. Once the initial excitement wore off, we got to work brainstorming concepts for the theme of our room.
Early concepts
We knew that to have a chance of winning, our room had to be unconventional. It had to have a selling point: a concept at its core that could be summarized in a blurb and immediately capture people’s attention. One of our early ideas, proposed by D, involved a device that players could upgrade with parts as the room progressed, allow it to unlock more complex doors and contraptions. The room would be styled after the steampunk genre, which is often associated with intricate machinery and gears, and the players would play the role of engineers trying to repair a grand machine or steal a precious artifact. But we soon realized a major flaw with this concept: the device itself. Escape rooms are meant to be a collaborative effort, with each player contributing and the group splitting up to tackle separate puzzles if necessary. It became apparent that with a single modular tool, odds were high that some players would end up fighting over it, and it would restrict any sort of divide-and-conquer strategies for solving the room. And while we could just give each player their own device, that would diminish its uniqueness and importance in the story. So we kept that idea in the back of our minds and turned our attention elsewhere.
I mentioned earlier above that escape rooms are big on immersion. The three of us agreed that we wanted a big “wow” moment, something that would have the players entirely immersed in the experience and would be a definite talking point after the experience was over. As we brainstormed, we thought to ourselves, what would we need to do to create a “wow” moment like that? We realized that we wanted something that would change the context of the entire narrative up until that point. And we found a theme that would let us do exactly that.
Our theme
Imagine this: the players enter an ordinary office, with papers and books strewn across the desks. They’ve been tasked with retrieving the research notes of a disappeared scientist. Everything seems normal, but in one corner of the room is an odd-looking reinforced door with strange lights above it. The players gradually discover hints about the door’s purpose, culminating in the moment where they unlock it and step through to the other side… into an identical office? But the wallpaper is peeling, the floor tiles are broken, and a flickering computer screen shows the scientist’s desperate last message before succumbing to radiation poisoning. The players piece the clues together and come to the same conclusion: they’ve been transported into the future, into a hopeless, apocalyptic world.
Time travel.
With that, we had our theme and our “wow” moment. But we soon realized that coming up with the theme was the easy part. Now we had to figure out how we would design the room based around the idea of time travel.
We each had several different ideas on cool mechanics that could be used to sell the experience of travelling through time. My initial brainstorming brought me to the idea of a turnstile, à la Tenet, that the players would enter. The door would shut and the turnstile would rotate to the “future” room while playing funky lights and sound effects to disguise the movement. When the door opened, voila, they’re in the future! We even experimented with having the players visit several different time periods throughout the course of the experience. I loved the idea, but it eventually became clear that it wouldn’t be feasible to implement, and we wanted to keep things technologically simple to not scare off the judges when we asked them to build this thing.
Something we also considered including was an “endgame” event, something to signify that the players were nearing the end and they just needed to do a few more steps to finish the room.
TO BE CONTINUED!