Undercooked, created by Omescape and available as a real-world escape room in the Bay Area, invites teams of 2–6 players, targeted toward high schoolers and adults, as well as foodies and puzzle-lovers, to enter a high-stakes kitchen with a twist: a famous food critic is arriving soon, and it’s your job to prepare a full-course meal that will impress them. Blending physical immersion with puzzle mechanics, Undercooked is a fast-paced, team-based experience that showcases how setting and story can be seamlessly intertwined. In this analysis, I argue that Undercooked‘s clever use of spatial storytelling and environmental puzzles exemplifies strong narrative architecture, but its lack of accessibility support creates ethical limitations that constrain the inclusivity of the experience.
Narrative is embedded into every corner of Undercooked, not through heavy exposition, but through the mechanics and architecture itself. The escape room is designed as a functioning kitchen, complete with a pantry, prep station, sushi section, meat section, refrigerator, and even a chilly walk-in freezer. Each puzzle acts as a micro-story: solving a riddle about sushi grants access to a refrigerated fish compartment, going to bake some bread leads to the UV light inside an oven to reveal a hidden number on the loaf. These design decisions illustrate Ernest Adams’ concept of “narrative architecture,” where space is story: the layout, objects, and even temperature help guide the player through a narrative arc without needing any traditional dialogue or cutscenes
The game’s central mechanic is assembling dishes from hidden ingredients, and it reinforces the kitchen narrative. Each successful puzzle yields ingredients, and each ingredient – a plastic, yet very realistic-looking food item – has a number on it. Combining the correct ingredient numbers and inputting them into the iPad screen reveals what dish you’ve created. The more dishes completed, the higher your score. These mechanics also mirror the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework: the mechanics (ingredient retrieval and recipe completion) drive the dynamics (team cooperation and puzzle chaining), which deliver the aesthetic experience of being frantic, competent chefs in a Michelin-star rush.
What differentiates Undercooked from other escape rooms is the sheer coherence between environment and gameplay. Puzzles aren’t just inserted into the setting, they emerge logically from it. Baking ingredients are hidden near the oven, dairy in the fridge, meat under cutting boards. Even decorative elements: family aprons, a trophy case, a cluttered phonebook, convey the backstory: this is a family-run kitchen with a legacy, not a sterile cooking lab. The game’s architecture is not only beautiful, detailed, and immersive, but functional. The freezer isn’t just cold – it slows players down, introduces tension, and reminds them of real kitchen workflows. As time winds down, the background music speeds up, intensifying pressure like the climax of a reality cooking show, or even reminding me of The Bear, a dramatic TV show centered around a chef trying to make a name for his restaurant. Throughout the game, there were moments of tension when we were yelling at each other to look in certain areas of the room or grab certain items that we thought could help, or “i told you so” moments when the numbers we inputted would be rejected, but also great moments of success when we put in the numbers and realized what dish we had just made, whether it was apple pie or a salad — and I truly was stressed and felt like I was running a high-pressure kitchen. We were not allowed to bring phones in to take pictures, so I made a top-view diagram of what the setting and architecture was like:
Yet despite the brilliance of its storytelling and spatial logic, Undercooked falters ethically in accessibility. The game features little to no accommodations for players with physical disabilities. The entirely analog nature of the experience, with no audio clues, makes it difficult for blind players to fully participate. More problematically, one section requires players to physically crawl into an oven-like space, making the experience inaccessible to those who cannot kneel or crawl. There are no adjustable-height surfaces, no wheelchair-friendly design, and no narrative alternatives that allow disabled players to engage in puzzle-solving from outside those physical spaces. From the organization of the room, it is clear that there is limited open space in the room, and with 6 people running around, it could get crowded and even unsafe pretty quickly. One of my friends, Omar, injured his knee recently and was relying on a cane to walk, but throughout the experience, due to his limited mobility, mostly ended up staying in one place to get out of our way – since we were all running around – and just had us go to him for help with figuring out riddles. Additionally, the team-based nature of the game, with each player needing to take on a different role and race around to solve so many different puzzles (there were 26 total puzzles and my group of 6 solved 14 of them in an hour and a half), makes it difficult for hard-of-hearing people to enjoy and participate fully in the hectic, fast-paced game.
While some might argue that the realism of a cramped kitchen necessitates tight movement and physicality, such realism should not come at the expense of participation. Games, especially escape rooms, rely on inclusion to create shared emotional highs. Incorporating accessibility features, like dual sensory clues (tactile, audio) as alternative paths for physically demanding puzzles, or a narrative justification for team-based relay solving, could widen the room’s audience without sacrificing immersion. When discussing accessible game design, “realism” is not a good excuse for exclusion, it is just a design constraint waiting to be creatively overcome.
Compared to other rooms in the genre, like The Heist by The Escape Game, which provides players with a clear narrative arc of infiltration, obstacle, and escape, Undercooked takes a more open-ended approach. Rather than escaping the room, the objective is to gather as many points (meals) as possible. While this creative framing works well in the context of a cooking game, it does reduce narrative urgency. Without a clear high-stakes reason to “escape,” the narrative stakes flatten. A more compelling premise, such as impressing the food critic to save a family restaurant from closing, might add emotional weight and cohesion to the puzzle progression.
Ultimately, Undercooked is a masterclass in spatial narrative design and I would go back to play it over and over again just to revel in the design of the space and analyze it even further to figure out every last clever puzzle. Every puzzle and ingredient retrieval action reinforces the kitchen theme, creating a unified storyworld that players explore through motion, collaboration, and discovery. But its lack of inclusive design risks alienating potential players and limits the universality of its story. As game designers, we must ask: who is allowed to play? In its current form, Undercooked leaves some players out of the kitchen and out of the fun, and that is a problem worth fixing.
