- Five keys, two swords, three watches, - [Chris] Yeah. - and how many horses? - Four. (celebrates victory) - Oh, they're having so much fun. - This is how burglars truly operate as well... (giggles) - This is a video that I have
wanted to make for a while. Since 2007, the world has gone from having zero escape rooms to upwards of 50,000, representing a brand
new kind of game design that is constantly evolving. As all of these rooms race to outdo one another. We're going to take you
inside a room titled Loot The Lanes, from Brighton
based company, Pier Pressure, which won best escape room
in the United Kingdom, for two years running. We're going to show off
its most brilliant puzzles and learn from the team behind it how you build and operate a world class escape room. To state the obvious, this
video will contain spoilers for Loot The Lanes, but probably not as many as you'd expect. One of the first things we
learned from Pier Pressure is that great escape rooms, aren't in fact defined by their secrets. We should also mention that the footage you'll see in this video of our team playing the room, was filmed in December, before the UK entered its
recent coronavirus lockdown. And with that, let's begin. How do you build a truly
world-class escape room? Well, it all starts with immersion. To start work on their set, Pier Pressure ripped up
the room's floorboards to reveal the historic
cobblestones underneath. They created fake
signage and fake branding for all of their fake shops. And not only did they
commission a carpenter to build them a red British phone box, they salvaged and
reprogrammed an old payphone. - See, it's those little details that just make it feel real. It feels like you're
using a real telephone. When you speak to Betty, it's a different character
to the ordinary host. - One early puzzle in Loot The Lanes sees a player trying
to get access to a shop by calling up the owner and pretending to be an electrician, which feels completely plausible, even though the shop isn't
real, she isn't real, and the phone isn't real. - Hello, Betty speaking. - Hi Betty, it's Chris here, the lecky. - By the time the room was
dressed, props were bought, puzzles were commissioned, microphones and cameras were installed and plugged into a control room that also had to be built. The total build cost was £60,000, which apparently, isn't that much. - We went to play one of the games that was in the top 10 in Vienna in Austria, and that was a 300,000 Euro, creation. That's the kind of
direction we need to go in if we want to be hitting
those top 10 spaces. - But, building an escape
room that's truly immersive, isn't just time-consuming and expensive. It also has to dictate how you design the room's puzzles. - Oh, let's go to an antique shop, what would be there in an antique shop. There'd probably be clocks. There'd probably be mirrors. Let's see which of these,
we can turn into a puzzle. So why do any of this in
the service of immersion? Why not just chuck some sand on the floor, tell players they're
in a pirate's basement and pocket the remaining 40 grand? - What people are getting
out of an escape room is that they are entering a
different world for an hour, and I think especially this year, it's been quite nice to
escape our reality for a bit, and be someone else. - Maybe you watching this still think that trying to convince a group of adults that they're actually stealing a diamond from an actual jewellery
shop is a fool's errand. But if so, think again, according to a 2019 survey
of escape room enthusiasts, the most popular themes for escape rooms related to either solving, or doing crimes, while the least popular themes related to zombies and magic. So, clearly the more plausible
you can make your room, the more people dig it. Now, how your Loots The Lanes experience actually begins, is very interesting. After receiving your briefing, your host unexpectedly
raps on the window, looking like an empurpled Riddler and literally marches you down the street to the
venue, joking the whole way. - I actually think that the
host in your escape room is probably the single
biggest impact, influencer, on how much fun a team has. All of our hosts say, a lot of them are trained actors, so they'll come out and
they'll be larger than life, and they'll be bursting with enthusiasm. And that kind of gives people the, this is the sort of, the way that you interact
with an escape room, this is the way that you kind of throw yourself into it. - Turns out that the host
in a high class escape room is watching you and
listening to you so much more than I thought. So that they can give you hints before you get frustrated. - I would maybe point you to have another snoop around the record shop,
potentially. - To make sure you don't break stuff. That knife. - There's something in
there, I'm not feeling great. - Stop, stop, tell them to stop stabbing. - [Host] I say, what have
those vents done to you?! (giggles) - But also your host
is watching you closely so that they can vibe
with the tone of the room. At one point in our playthrough, the host calls up to give
us a hint, and I said, - Oh, okay. (Quinns yells) - You have a go. - I hate this guy. - No, no, I need help. - Hello. - And the host replied, - Hello there, I must say I'm
actually rather fond of you. (giggles) - And in doing that, the host was able to
brush aside my irritation and put a smile on my face. Maybe the thing that increased my respect for escape room hosts most of all was realising how much of their job is watching people fail to do puzzles. - Look at the things that you're holding. - I've been over there, and I even said. - That was painful. (hosts laughing) - But we had to put them out... - We had to put them out of misery. - Finally, when Loot The Lanes ends, your host comes out and makes a point of reminding your team, all the cool moments
of comedy and teamwork that your team might've forgotten in the mad scramble to win the room. And also they give you
a little certificate stamped with these dinky
little achievements. - People like to feel
good about themselves, and just that simple fact, making someone feel good about themselves actually has a lot of
benefits for their cognition, they, they work faster,
they can work better. - It's really great, I think for the players, for the game's host to be able to say, I saw this happened and so you remember this happened? And you missed that thing
for ages, you know, like that interaction at the end, it really kind of cements the experience in the mind of the people
that have played it. - But apparently even a veteran host is still going to be caught off guard from time to time. - I had a group who
essentially, simultaneously, decided, in a sort of hive mind, that what they needed to do was to push all the windows in, oh, we just shove these in, oh, okay, one, two, three. and I was like, no! And it was the start, I'm pretty sure I remember it being the start of a busy day, and I had about 20 minutes
in between the game to try and fix all the windows. - No prizes for guessing that good puzzles are a key part of what makes an escape room, good. But have you ever thought about
what makes a puzzle, good? - We're a really big fan
of putting stuff in sight, but making it so that people
can't get to it straight away. - Which of course sat
perfectly with the theme of Brighton's Lanes. - We were really excited
by the possibility of having players,
being able to look into, peer into the shop windows, you know, like an excited child just
before Christmas, right? So we actually have some
puzzles that play with that, that play with having to
look into the shop windows and kind of peer in and... - [Chris] Oh my God, that's
very cool, that's very cool. It lines up with the number six. - To say that escape rooms are simply rooms full of puzzles is both true and completely missing the point. Puzzles in escape rooms are distinguished from puzzles in books or video games because they're physical, which means, you're very means
of interacting with a puzzle can be a toy in and of itself, and Loot The Lanes is a toy box. From remote control
cranes to a sample pad, to a barcode scanner that
our team had more fun with than is prudent to admit. I mean, how do these work? (all laughing) We also learned from Pier Pressure that it's wise for an escape room to require multiple people to input the answer to a puzzle, just because then players have someone to celebrate with when they're correct. (celebration sounds) - You guys. - [Chris] Yeah? - So excited and yet so wrong. - In my video game work, I came to see great puzzles as ones where you feel so clever when you solve them, but if you're in a group, it can perhaps be more important for a puzzle to simply elicit
a response from the group, which creates a memorable
moment for everybody. And that can come from something as goofy as luring a fake mouse
with some plastic cheese. (giggles) - Oh, okay, all right, a mouse and a key. - [Quinns] Of course it does. - Finally, Pier Pressure taught me that great puzzles don't mean a thing, if you don't also have flow. - Game flow is probably
the most important, it keeps the excitement, it keeps the tension. You need people to keep
moving in the escape room and keep finding things to do. And it's a very tight balancing act. You need to get that right. That it's not too easy. So one thing isn't always
leading to the next, and it's super obvious, but you don't
want them to finish something, and then they go, right, and now what? - So what are some basics of flow? Well, you're going to want your room to have lots of different
puzzles for players to work on at any one point so that everyone on the team
has something to do themselves, but also so that if someone
gets stuck on a puzzle, they can just go and do something else and aren't stuck bashing
their head against the wall. But then, if you've got a room that spreads your players out, you also need moments that bring them all, back together again. - One of the puzzles I'm
actually very proud of in that game is we have a thing, we call it the finger maze. And, the idea from it actually came from the old Romeo and Juliet movie, right? Where they're like, Claire
Danes and Leo DiCaprio are walking along either side of a fish tank. - Also, when a puzzle is solved, you can't have the reward
just be another puzzle. - When we give a reward, we'll want it to be a bit of a puzzle and we'll want that bit of a puzzle to then get their mind racing as to what they can do with this thing. If it's the first bit of that
puzzle they've discovered, then they'll find a new thing, they'll be excited, but they won't know what to do with it. But then they might uncover the third or the fourth
element of it and go, right, I've seen this before and they'll link the items together. And that keeps the
energy and the excitement and the all important flow moving. - Often, the best reward of all is a brand new room with a whole new vibe, gifting players with the
raw thrill of discovery. Oh my God, this is awesome. Holy kittens! - Our ultimate goal
would be a team finishing with about 30 seconds to spare, because that is the,
that's the sweet spot, that's where everyone's going (yelling) We won, yay. - I learned so much
talking to Pier Pressure and they left me with one
very exciting thought. And that was that, there's wasn't the way to
make a great escape room, but only one way. - Most escape rooms,
they're built by the people that own them, they're
independent and fiercely so. They reflect the creativity, ideas and imagination of totally
and wildly different people. - If you want to help us keep growing and keep telling stories, I've got a surprise for you. The entire 70 minute video of Chris and me playing Loot The Lanes is available right now to
all backers of our Patreon. Holy kittens! And that's not all. If you back at a level
that's slightly higher than the lowest level you can back, you get access to cool regular features like Bad Idea House, where Chris and me discuss the ideas we wanted to turn into
stories but couldn't. Sometimes because those ideas were bad. And also the Patreon Show, in which Chris takes you behind the scenes to tell you what's going
on with the channel, which is very useful as
I often have no idea. Thanks again for watching everybody. And please consider
donating to our Patreon at patreon.com/peoplemakegames - [Quinns] Oh, look, Chris, you dingus! (laughing) The amount of times
they're slapping the lock. Here you go, it's Mr. Egypt. Mr. England. - [Chris] Oh, and another, - Remember to scan the
monuments in the correct order, [Inaudible] It's a clue I didn't need, but probably did.
