May 2024 - Ronan Jennings

Long before we ever opened our first escape room, we were thinking and planning and imagining the rooms of our dreams. What would we do if we ever got the opportunity to build our own games? It was a lot of fun, and good practice for when we finally got the chance to do it for real.

Even though building games is now our real job, coming up with new ideas and plotting out new concepts is still as fun as it ever was.

So this is a new series where I'll look at whatever's currently in the cultural zeitgeist, and see how I'd turn it into an escape room.

First up: FALLOUT! The games have been huge hits for a couple decades now, and the new Amazon show is fantastic. It's all anyone's talking about.

For those not in the loop, Fallout is the story of people surviving in a post-apocalyptic America, after a nuclear war has wiped out most of civilisation. Some people have had the luxury of hiding out in enormous underground ‘Vaults’ for the last 200 years, while others have had to survive and scavenge on the surface. Our protagonists need to wander the wasteland in search of something or other, running into wacky characters and getting carried away on wild quests along the way. Murder and hilarity ensues.

So how do we make a Fallout-themed escape room? Well there's the very obvious solution built right into the Fallout world: the Vaults. Vaults are sealed chambers that the protagonists often need to find ways to break out of. Now what does that remind me of?

The escape room potential is obvious. You're sealed in a Vault, and need to either break out of it, or repair its various systems (like every spaceship-themed escape room), or both.

And you could stop there. That's an essentially fully formed escape room concept, it basically writes itself. The water purifier’s broken, reconnect the electrical cables, recover the fusion core, override the main door control, badda bing badda boom: escape room.

Open the door and escape from the Vault, it writes itself.

But that's not really Fallout, is it? Sure, it would look like Fallout. It would be like the first episode of the show! It'd be like the opening 30 minutes of Fallout 3! It'd be like the least interesting part of Fallout 3…

Fallout isn't successful because you get to be in a Vault. It's successful because of what the characters find BEYOND the Vault, because it's a roleplaying game where you get to explore, meet characters, go on quests and make choices. There are factions to join and followers to recruit, you can forge your own path through the wasteland in whatever way you want.

One of my key tenets to escape room design is that you need to be able to fulfill the fantasy that you're promising. Don't build a pirate ship if the players don't get to fire cannons or swing swords, because then you're not making a pirate game, you're making a stowaway simulator. Don't make an escape room based on one of the best role playing games of all time without any roleplaying.

I'd love to throw the whole Vault idea out the window and set this instead in the wasteland, but the Vaults are just too perfect, and a wasteland is the exact opposite of an escape room. So we're sticking with the Vaults, but we can bring those elements from the wasteland INTO the Vault.

Picture this: There are 3 pneumatic tubes on the wall, each one labeled with the details for different characters who might try to contact you. Capsules can *thwoonk!*, appear in each of the tubes, with messages from people beyond the Vault.

There are 3 tubes, linking to 3 people, with 3 different goals. Each one wants something different from you, but you won't have time to complete all of their requests, and eventually they'll start to conflict with each other, and you'll have to make a choice.

And I think the game is starting to take shape…

Everything’s safe inside the Vault, right…?

You wake up, alone and isolated, the last surviving occupant of Vault 01. What happened here? Something bad, by the looks of it.

What was a perfect, retro-futuristic 1950s American paradise of steel and safety, is now the site of a massacre.

Raiders from the wasteland have somehow entered the Vault, and you and your team are the only survivors. Blood is smeared on the walls, equipment has been destroyed, and there are some classic Bethesda-style skeletons posed in amusing ways that hint at their deaths.

From Fallout 4. What was this guy’s story?

  Explore the Vault, open some doors, and get to grips with your surroundings. You leave your Living Quarters to discover the Overseer’s Office, the Engineering Room, and of course the Main Vault door.

When you reach the Overseer's Office, you hear a noise: *thwoonk!*, and then another, and another. Messages have arrived from three mysterious contacts:

Residents of another nearby Vault have heard what has happened. They want you to make repairs and get the whole place up and running again.

The Brotherhood of Steel, a technocratic cult determined to find and preserve pre-war technology, have got in touch. They see a Vault full of lost knowledge, and they want you to recover what you can and bring it to them.

A mysterious third person, going only by the name “Jim”. What does Jim want? They claim they want to help, that they're another survivor. But do you trust them? A Vault dweller in need of help, or a wasteland raider trying to finish what they started? You can't be sure…

Each contact has a mission for you. Get the water purifier back online, download data from the Vault archives, find food supplies with a certain ingredient (what're you after, Jim?).

Complete each quest for each faction and they'll give you another: Reactivate the power supply by connecting some cables, find a way to access the Vault’s fusion core, inspect the bodies to determine the ID of the Vault's Overseer. There's got to be a point where you hunt through the Vault with a laser gun, blasting giant mutated cockroaches (Shout-out to Star Crew at Escape Reality Glasgow for doing this and creating one of my single favourite escape room moments ever).

This continues, with each quest being a mixture of classic escape room puzzle, an interactive mechanical task, or some Case Closed-style deduction.

You might find yourself favouring one quest line over another, but will likely be trying to do as many as you can.

That is until Jim asks you to override the Overseer's computer, and flood your friends in the other Vault with toxic gas. Until the Brotherhood of Steel want you to build a bomb. Until the other Vault dwellers determine that all others are a threat and you need to seal yourself in the Vault alone, forever. For that full Fallout nuclear gut punch, maybe one of the endings has you triangulate coordinates to drop a nuke (RIP the town of Megaton. I was 13 years old and just too curious. Forgive me.).

You make your choice, you ensure success for the faction you've aligned yourself with, and you end the game by unlocking the main Vault door and exiting to the wasteland beyond.

If we wanted to go even further, one last task before unlocking the final door could be to pack a bag with supplies for your journey. You've got limited space, and access to different equipment depending on the quests you completed. Cans of food with that *special* ingredient, a special kind of laser wrench, a bottle of purified water, the raiders’ discarded guns, the Brotherhood’s bomb, a severed human hand.

This defines the character you imagine yourself becoming as you leave the Vault, and acts as a “Character Creation” moment, like in the games. Your choice of equipment is reviewed at the end, and you're scored on your choices.

If you wanted to take it one step EVEN further, you could then be quickly run through a list of challenges and difficulties that you'll run into in the wasteland, with your chosen equipment determining if you'll survive or die. This could be done by the GM reading through a pre-set list of threats, and unpacking your bag with you, seeing if you prepared the necessary tools to overcome it. You get a score based on how many dangers you overcome and which factions will protect you. You’ve escaped your Vault, made your choices, prepared for your journey, and ventured into the unknown. Survive or die, that’s the way of the wasteland.

And that's how I'd make a Fallout themed escape room! Use an environment from the world of the games and show that best suits the restrictions of our format, come up with a narrative that supports it, and implement the core fantasy of what we're trying to emulate. It can't be Fallout without roleplaying and decision-making, and there's no reason an escape room can't have those things.

That ending might be pushing it a little too far, and maybe the game should just end when you leave the Vault. But hey, this is the place for experimentation. Much like a Vault Tec executive, we've got no rules and unlimited budget, so let's come up with the things that would be too weird to try in real life. Because maybe we'll learn a thing or two, and maybe something in here can be used in a real game.

We're building at least one new game a year so we're never too far from our next real project, and now I've got this really good idea for how to implement characters, factions, and pneumatic tubes…