For my team’s escape room — Escape the Neighborhood System!— I wanted to evoke the emotions of surprise and collegiate nostalgia/familiarity. To this end, I made the following:
My Moodboard (made on Canva):
3 directions for the game:
As a team during brainstorming, we agreed upon the following types of fun: Challenge, Fellowship, Discovery. We also agreed upon the general narrative that the players are a draw group of friends trying to escape the neighborhood system. After a series of puzzles, they escape and are granted the key to MTL’s house, where they can now live! I have some more specific / individual thoughts below:
- I like the idea of using a map to guide the gameplay and to orient the narrative. I think it could be cool to have all players start with the premise that they need to journey through all neighborhoods to escape them all. At each neighborhood, they encounter a different puzzle, which gives them part of a code. At the end, they combine this code with an existing code on the map, like a final puzzle, to ultimately escape the system. They are then granted a key to MTL’s house.
- Another narrative idea (more dark horse) is that Stanford and/or ResX is maliciously targeting students who are trying to escape the neighborhood system (the players). Thus, the players are not only escaping the neighborhood system, but are also running away from the people pursuing them. The end goal then would be safety as well.
- Below is a rough sketch of what I imagine a map (from point 1) might look like. Players find parts of a code in each neighborhood, and combine them at the end to get the final code (perhaps a word, or a sequence of letters and numbers) that unlocks a box and grants them the key to MTL’s house.
