April 2024 - Ronan Jennings
Before you grab your pitchforks, let me explain. And before I explain, let me go on a long and winding tangent before eventually arriving at my point.
Escape Rooms aren’t a genre of game, they’re an entire medium of entertainment. Well, I suppose escape rooms that are actually escape rooms are a genre: You’re locked in a room, you must solve puzzles to escape. But the industry evolved beyond that a long time ago.
How many rooms have you played where “escaping” is really the goal? Pull off a heist, find the laboratory, recover the treasure, solve the mystery. This is all great, but we’ve stagnated again. The setup has changed, and new technology has emerged, but the core gameplay still varies hardly at all from game to game.
Yes, there are different themes, and different ways that games are dressed up and styled, but when you get down to it they’re all the same game at their core. You’ve got puzzles, codes, keys, and sometimes some fun sensors and magnets or clever bespoke pieces of tech. But none of this is what makes escape rooms unique. People don’t love escape rooms because it’s where they get to find a number to put into a lock, they love them because it’s a real life, interactive experience.
Think about video games. Think about every video game you’ve ever played. Call of Duty, FIFA, Grand Theft Auto, Age of Empires, Portal, Tetris. These are all video games, but the gameplay in each one is completely different from game to game. Action, Puzzles, Strategy, Adventure. Cooperation or Competition? Free Roam or Linear? Story or Puzzles? They aren’t the same game with a different lick of paint, they’re all entirely unique experiences within the medium of moving pixels around on a screen.
The same applies to board games. Sure there are games that have things in common, but the breadth and depth of the variety is immense. All that stays the same is the fact you’re sitting around a table (sometimes even without a board!) with your friends.
The medium of video games is moving pixels on a screen, the medium of board games is sitting around a table, the medium of escape rooms is that you’re physically in a room that you can fully interact with. Puzzles (I’ve arrived at the point!) are a game mechanic. They’re a fun game mechanic, everyone loves a good puzzle, but it’s basically the only game mechanic escape rooms have. There’s variety with how the puzzles are presented, and they’re occasionally broken up by fun physical activities, but it always comes back to the puzzles. I suppose that’s because puzzles are the easiest game mechanic to create in real life. It’s harder to make a first person shooter in an escape room, or let the players fly a plane, command armies or fist fight a mobster. But there’s a lot of middle ground there, a lot of gameplay potential between those two extremes. Assuming every escape room has to be a list of puzzles is going to get us trapped.
I’ve heard a lot of talk that escape rooms are past their prime, a declining hobby that was fun for a bit of novelty. But that’s nonsense. People might be getting bored of locks and keys, but escape rooms are as defined by locks and keys as cinema in the 1920s was by live piano accompaniments. They’re a necessity, but only for now.
There’s so much you can do in a room.
For the games at Case Closed, we mostly did away with codes and locks, and replaced it with forms to fill out in the players’ own words, so the answers can be nuanced and varied and not restricted to a series of numbers. We don’t ask players to find a code, we ask them to look at a crime scene and genuinely tell us what they think happened. There’s room for interpretation, there’s different ways at arriving at the answers, and players often come up with theories and suggestions that are so good that they progress in the game even though it was never something that was intended. Beyond that, we have a witness interrogation with a real person, we have decisions that have real consequences on how your game plays out, we have an audience of fake listeners judging the quality of your radio show, we have a [spoiler] with a [spoiler].
We didn’t look at other escape rooms for inspiration, because that’s how the industry gets trapped in a feedback loop with no innovation - we looked at videogames and tried to recreate them in real life. Because that’s what escape rooms are, or at least what they should be. Not puzzle boxes where you’re trapped on the inside, but a videogame, a fully interactive experience, brought to life to immerse yourself in.
I don’t want to be gloating or tooting my own horn here. The Murder of Max Sinclair was a step in the right direction, and Radio Nowhere is one step further, but they’re the first steps in a long, long journey, and I don’t know what the end looks like.
For our upcoming projects we’re looking into having side-quests and optional objections, branching narratives with completely different endings, giving the games total replayability. We want to introduce a currency system with a shop inside the game itself, give the players health bars, enemies to fight, and NPCs to interact with. Perhaps there’ll be hidden agendas where one player is secretly working against the others. Perhaps there’ll be different roles to fill by different players, like they’re manning different stations on the bridge of the Enterprise, or making up a D&D party.
How many of these things will actually make it into the games? How many of them will work in practice, or be remotely feasible with a group of random customers off the street? We don’t know. But we’re going to find out. We’re going to try these things, we’ll workshop them, and we’ll see what else we can come up with.
There’s SO much potential out there, there’s SO much room to grow. But we don’t want to be exploring these things alone. If you own an escape room, or are thinking about building one, bear this in mind. Do something different. Do something bold. We’re in the early early days of the industry, where escape rooms vary from game to game as much as Pacman does to Pong, and occasionally there’s something special that stands out as if it’s Tetris.
But this is early, we’re all so early and we have so much room to grow. Show me our God of War. Show me Baldur's Gate 3, Breath of the Wild, and Elden Ring. There’s so much more we can do.
Yeah it might not be safe, or reliable, or the obvious solution. But we all deserve better.
Take a chance. And go make something.
