This week, I was lucky enough to be able to attend an escape room – a unique and immersive puzzle where the player is locked in a room and must solve puzzles as a requirement to exiting. Escape rooms are often structured around a central theme, and thus the room’s puzzles and esthetic often serve to reinforce this. Escape rooms also vary in the difficulty of their challenges and the depth/duration of the experience – meaning an escape room may feature multiple rooms, have puzzles that require multiple players, may allow for hints or support, etc.
The escape room I attended was horror-themed and held at a professional escape room venue. I attended the room with two other close friends, and the escape room difficulty was rated by the venue at a 9/10 difficulty. We additionally opted-in for jump scares and other room-related frights. Due to the complexity of some of the puzzles, and the horror theme, this escape room seemed designed for young adults. Perhaps needless to say, one of the things that place escape rooms in a near category of their own is the physicality and spatial depth to which individuals engage in the puzzle. As is consistent with Scott Kim’s definition of a puzzle (found in “What is a Puzzle?”), puzzles have a “right answer”, and often have a tight ruleset to follow. Escape rooms, however, allow their players much more freedom in figuring out this right answer. Players may run around and consult each other; they may solve their clues in varying orders; they may even ask a game master for a hint. The puzzles, thus, are not so much the game; solving the puzzles, discovering the narrative, and forging your own path through a space full of clues is. I argue that while escape rooms may employ puzzles similar to those seen in other puzzle genres (codes, pattern-matching, etc.), escape rooms foster a different body of fun and thus bring enjoyment through a more nuanced mixing of them.
The escape room started with an explicit and in-depth onboarding session. We were instructed how we should and should not interact with the room so to both not damage items and to understand the structure of the puzzles. This session helped to introduce us to the room’s mechanics, and served a similar function to a tutorial. Once in the room, puzzles were mostly composed of figuring out how to find a “key” or a “code” – and some puzzles even featured figuring out how to input that key as part of the puzzle (i.e., arranging books to unlock a door is I feel part of the puzzle). This is not markedly different than the puzzles we are presented with in other games (The Witness, for example, also makes us find codes and arrange items to pass to a new space). Yet, the puzzle and challenge existed in a greater context. The unlocking of physical locks to flee a dark and cramped space, the worry that a jump scare might be lurking around the corner (the game master absolutely did scare the stuff out of me when banging on the murky window when I finally entered the code to it), personified the space with the puzzle. We interact with our world often in puzzle-like ways; we see a ruleset, whether physics or social, and we act in accordance thereof to solve the problem. In the escape room, where a lock covers the exit, not only is the puzzle to solve the code, but the human instinct is to do the same. The player thus is given more opportunity to interact with the game in a fuller way, in a more human way, and thus can connect more deeply with it than something with a narrower ruleset.
The escape room, additionally, was able to simply able to take advantage of more senses available to the player. Less limited than its digital and analogue peers, the escape room featured tactile puzzles and complementingly horror-themed sights and odors. One room was noticeably darker and damper than the others. In another, I could feel the table gently thump as the heart atop it began to beat. While these indeed functioned as essential elements for the mechanics of the game (i.e., the darkness was necessary to allow for black-light hidden messages), they could further personify the game into a fuller bodied experience for the player.
However, while the escape room indeed takes advantage of these many possible senses, it does take for granted the able-bodiedness of its players. Low light meant low contrast. Crawling through closets meant the need for a certain level of physicalness. Having jump scares, frankly, meant not having a pre-existing heart condition. For players unable to meet this “perfectly able” definition, the breadth and body of the game would have not only been less, but may have led to discomfort.
Overall, because escape rooms are able to take more advantage of physical space and the senses of its players, they have more opportunity to engage the player in fun. Playing an escape room was a great reminder for me as a designer to see that games can interact with its players in an extremely engaging and full-bodied way!
