Escape Rooms Are Broken. Let's Fix Them.

[jwelda]

I tried the Marion County Jail escape room. They just put me in a room with no keys and no puzzles and the dungeon master wouldn’t give up a single clue and didn’t release me for 6 years. 3/5

[OntheOtherHandVideos]

It never occurred to me that escape rooms are one-shot role playing sessions. Wow, mind blown.

[TheElKjaro]

So I've actually worked as a game master last year, and I generally agree with you. The only thing I'm a bit opposed to is the "No puzzles on laminated paper"-pet peeve. Because yeah, it feels a bit weird to find things like that in a jungle-setting. Then again, do keep in mind that about 30% of people act like actual gorillas when they're inside the room. So the things have to be durable. Also, the game masters have to desinfect the interior of the room and reset it in about 15 minutes each time. Non-laminated scrolls and postcards will be fucking destroyed in about half a day.

[nightlord]

"WE NEED A HINT"
Message seen, left on read.

[lauren-gxlg]

One of the coolest escape rooms I've been to was run by a cat shelter as a fundraiser. It was a cat-related theme (so original that it's the only thing that comes up when you google it and I don't want to dox myself) but the shelter director wrote it herself and you could tell she was passionate about it. It was awesome to see her combining these two passions to make a fundraiser I'd actually want to go back to.

[SebLeCaribou]

The best escape room I can remember was one taking place in an abandoned submarine at the bottom of the ocean with important papers about a russian invasion. And there was some sort of gas leak that needed to be fixed before continuing the investigation; so at the start of the adventure, the whole team needed to wear a gasmask that was super limiting in terms of vision. It was pitch dark and we needed flashlights to navigate the room. It was just so great thematically and put us right into the mood of the game.
But the great thing is: all the puzzles were contextualised by the submarine. It was all about opening sectors, decompression, restarting the engines etc. to let us access other parts of the main room.

[Kasia]

My favorite experience with an escape room was one in which our group of 10 was split into 2 groups. The 5 who were more "Right Brain" and the 5 who were more "Left Brain". The groups were in two separate (but combined through holes in the wall) rooms. Each room had similar puzzles that we needed to work together to solve (which was hard with only vocal communication).

The set design was amazing too. Right brain room had bright colors and random patterns, bean bag chairs, and such, the left brain was all black and white, fancy chairs, math related things. When we had the chance to see each other's room both groups just ran around exploring because we had so much fun finally seeing what the others were talking about.

It was amazing.

[brucetoons]

I've only done one actual escape room, I was an Egypt themed one, and everything was going fine (other than the fact that I felt like there wasn't enough for me to do and I was kind of bored) until the last puzzle, it turns out that the previous group had done the whole thing and escaped, and then they people who owned the escape room hadn't reset the last puzzle, meaning that the ending was ruined for us.

[Syy]

I feel like Escape Rooms seem to be artificially limiting themselves to the "Escape a Room" premise, probably because it's the most economical (small sets, no actors), but I think there's tons of potential for a premium experience leaning more into general interactive theater.

SuperBunnyHop has a great video where he describes going to a limited time only "Metal Gear Solid" escape room which was basically a stealth game in real life. Crawl around, avoid guards who were actors in the environment, and even hide in lockers with the exact same slot peep holes as in the games. Him describing that experience might be the most jealous I've ever been of anyone in my life.

[petersmythe]

"Not everyone knows the rules to chess."

Now here's an interesting idea for a medieval setting. Use rules to chess that very few or NO people understand, and make figuring out the rules from clues in the room important.

[juliensmit]

I’m from France. Strangely I don’t have the same feeling here. The level of quality in our escapes are getting higher and higher. The market is so competitive that only extra qualitative escapes are succeeding (last one in date was yesterday “the nautilus” by unleash escape, they called it a “narrative experience”, “not really an escape room”.

[LimeGreenTeknii]

"Your set dressing should be immersive"

I went to an escape room that was office-themed, and at the time it didn't occur to me that the theme could've been chosen to be more economical; I simply thought that they did a good job at making it feel like an office.

Another economical one was that we were musicians but we were locked out from getting on stage, so we were stuck backstage.

[somerandomkid]

See, ive actually gone to an escape room place that actually was an entire VR escape room. You walked around with a big laptop on your back and tried to fix this space station it was pretty unique

[MrBlitzpunk]

Well, i've been struggling for 23 years to escape my parents house. They do make a very good escape room, what's with the not having to pay rent and all that

[Vio]

So I had one of the best Game Master ever in a petty generic room, So before hand my group were joking that as the theme was a detective instigation that we should pretend to be characters from Brooklyn 99. Our game master clearly heard us so when we got stuck he called in as captain Holt and stay in character the whole time. He was best. We gave him a good tip after.

[ovvvven]

Probably my worst experience in an escape room is an issue that you didn’t even cover. I was playing an outer space themed escape room with my family. The four of us were paired with a this couple that had clearly done the escape room before and were just trying to get a new personal high score. We could barely do anything because we had no idea what was going on.

[becuaseimbored]

Austin : escape rooms are too easy
Me: needs to call for hints after getting stuck for two hours on the first clue in a room labeled "beginner"

[onbearfeet]

I think my favorite escape room experience was the time my group accidentally solved several puzzles WAY out of order because the GM underestimated us. The game had us playing as super spies trying to reconstruct how a mysterious occultist had gone missing, and the room was set up as the missing guy's study, including a full bookcase. Because half of us were drunk and half were sober (one person had skipped the pub crawl, another was pregnant, and I don't really drink), we divided up labor accordingly, giving Team Sober the most fiddly, detail-oriented tasks and assigning Team Drunk to gently ransack the place for clues. While my friends spread out, looking at the art on the walls or the papers on the desk, I went right to the books and singled out the ones least likely to have been bought by the foot or by the pound, noting which were actual old books with real titles and which were likely to be made up for the game. (I spent a lot of weekends in used bookstores as a kid, used to volunteer in a library, and am low-key obsessed with the minutiae of book repair, etc.) I ended up pulling out the most likely plant, flipping through it, and finding a clue that clearly connected to something we hadn't found yet. I presented the clue immediately because it had seemed easy to me, and easy puzzles come first, right?

Apparently the bookcase puzzle was supposed to happen later and take a lot longer, especially with a group that was half drunk. And that was before the "mysterious incantation" on a wall turned out to be plain old Latin. (Team Sober included a classics nerd, who had to be restrained from correcting the grammar.)

Apparently we'd been given a room that was thought to be challenging for a bachelorette party (which we were), and six women (three drunk) swanning in with feather boas and silly hats didn't seem all that well-equipped. We didn't mention when booking that the group included a librarian, a researcher, and multiple teachers, along with people who had picked up lots of weird knowledge or skills for various reasons. Ironically, solving the initial puzzles out of order made the final "magic ritual" harder because, not having a strong sense of which puzzles were supposed to be easy and which more difficult, we kept getting the steps out of sequence.

I have a lot of sympathy for game designers now. In hindsight, a half-drunk crew of fairly esoteric nerds in boas and plastic crowns is no one's ideal audience.

I was just glad there wasn't a wasn't a chess puzzle. None of us knew how to play chess.

[hicknopunk]

I have always wanted to do a purely physical escape room, no puzzles, only physically altering things in a room, like having to craft a lockpicking set out of light bulbs. I think that would be soooo fun.

[ihatemyname]

I feel like warnings would be nice
Like- “this room involves color puzzles. Make sure at least one of your party members is not colorblind”