Escape the Room: Mystery at the Stargazer’s Manor (2015) is a tabletop escape room (ER) in a box, designed by Rebecca Bleau and Nicholas Cravotta. The game itself indicated a target audience of players age 10 and up; I’d go a step further and say that this experience is for groups of players who enjoy in-home puzzling, don’t mind lack of novelty for replays (or don’t value replayability), and want a more cognitive than physical experience of traditional ERs.
While there was overarching narrative underlying the game which was attempted to be conveyed through the resources and materials representing different items within the game “room”, the structure of this game placed more emphasis on solving puzzles than the experience of being embedded in the story.
Without the true immersive environment and sense of urgency for time that a real escape room provides, an ER in a box relies solely on the material puzzles for providing the fun and explaining the narrative. Although an embedded narrative was intended, it was much more like the narrative was broken into discrete pieces as the “next achievement” to move forward in the game, not maintaining a consistent presence – and even that achievement didn’t create much incentive.
Where a real room would have light and sound effects and a temporary fear of not being able to leave if the puzzles were not solved, the tabletop version of the experience compromises both on the mechanisms through which the story is told and whether the dynamics allows the player to add their own emotions to the narrative development. For example, when a real ER would require a specific number of players to touch objects on different walls or turn different keys in a number of different locks simultaneously, I found fellow players (like Butch) saying “I don’t see why this game needs 6 players” and me replying with “Unless we need to hold hands at some point to do something *laugh*.”
All attention was directed solely to the materials in the game and manipulating these simply for validation. Unfortunately, there was little narrative built into these materials (beyond the scene cards), and what narrative was there was flimsy and forgettable. This was also due to the sense that the puzzles could sometimes be unintuitive, and involved a lot of what seemed like unnecessary trial and error.
So much time was spent on figuring out if we had all the materials to solve this particular puzzle, a concern that persisted moving forward when we weren’t sure if we had the resources to solve certain puzzles.
The solution wheel contributed to some of this narrative-breaking as well. We knew that we needed the same symbol to appear twice in the middle of the wheel to indicate that we had solved a puzzle. When we encountered puzzles that caused more frustration than others and we just wanted to move forward, the goal became to find forced validation in the wheel rather than work on what the wheel represented: a puzzle solved. Additionally, the generic solution wheel provided in every ‘Escape the Room’ game removed the puzzle solutions from their contexts, and forced them into a different one, detached from the narrative.
The backstory and context was present in the story cards, but the narrative itself was stalled between the progression of envelopes, moving from one “object” to another. At certain points, the narrative and purpose of the game were so far removed from the puzzles that Clara felt inclined to “cheat [her] way through this” by brute-forcing the symbols on the wheel to reveal themselves, which shifted the objectives from escaping the room to just making the wheel work. This was a result of two shortcomings: (1) the narrative and the puzzles were not tied enough to keep the players consistently invested in one or the other, and (2) the mechanics for solving the puzzles weren’t tight enough to maintain interest. The time element that adds to the suspense and immediacy of a real ER felt more like a suggestion than an atmospheric component of the game. Where the aesthetics should normally have been Challenge and Discovery, they became just Frustration.
While some puzzles involved more obvious affordances than others for solving (ex. the pipe puzzle) and the progression through the envelopes was somewhat satisfying, the game’s envelope-based architecture was rigid and sequential, resulting in stalling on one puzzle rather than a multi-threaded approach (which is what real ERs offer through their constant environmental cues).
In addition to the lack of regular environmental cues and incoherence of the puzzles, the game’s solution wheel was made incredibly inaccessible to colorblind players. Using traditional red, green, blue, and yellow colors is natural (Uno does it) because contrast is maximized for players who are not colorblind. But for those who are, this combination causes problems when not coupled with another form of differentiation like symbols. As noted in this blog, double-coding is an extremely helpful tool for game components that rely on color. While this game already used the common alternative (symbols) for a different purpose, they did have a responsibility to make this wheel more colorblind-friendly, perhaps through numbers.
Overall, this game felt more like a to-do list that needed to be checked off than an escape room full of discovery. It will be helpful in the sense of what to avoid when building multi-level analog puzzle games.
