Escape Rooms Are Broken. Let's Fix Them.

[Music] so a few years ago i went to my very first escape room and like a lot of folks i was immediately hooked i had never experienced anything like it before and after 60 minutes of puzzle solving with friends in an immersive locked room experience i was sure that this was going to be the next big thing and it was over the next few years the number of escape rooms across the world exploded and now it's not that uncommon to find a handful of different escape room businesses even in a small town like mine but as more businesses have popped up and i travel around the country and get chances to play them i'm starting to notice escape rooms they're like bad now let me explain so if you're unfamiliar escape rooms are real world interactive puzzle games where a group works together in a timed challenge to escape a locked room along the way they'll discover clues and solve challenges complete missions and experience a sort of interactive theater at least that's how they're supposed to work these days it's kind of hit or miss it's not that escape rooms have lost their novelty i actually think this is more of an over saturation and over commercialization issue it's the starbucks problem a small business that did something really well but has since scaled up to such a great extent that the quality of the product offered has to be lowered either to meet the demand or to beat the competition with the more appealing price so escape rooms have gone from being a premium 60 experience to low quality 30 dollar experiences when escape rooms first started out the owners were generally gaming enthusiasts that built custom rooms for specific locations but escape rooms have franchises now anybody with 500 square feet and enough money for a basic game kit can start one even if you have no game design experience at all and if you play enough of them you'll start to notice the sort of paint by numbers approach that most escape room businesses have adopted it's not that uncommon to find a puzzle room in one part of the country being used in another part of the country with no real variation because it's literally the same game from the same supplier just deployed in a different physical location but the problem goes way beyond just cheapo cookie cutter puzzles out of the box options make it so easy to open up shop that business owners they often jump into the escape room business with a total lack of understanding on how to operate these games properly running an escape room well is incredibly challenging and often it takes just one bad experience for a person to write the hobby off all together and there's a real danger in the overabundance of bad escape rooms poisoning the well so to speak for good escape rooms so what's a bad room like here are some common issues with escape rooms today that frustrate me to no end and specifically how i might go about fixing them cliche rooms i just mentioned the carbon copy games found in a lot of franchise locations but by extension escape rooms are starting to suffer from sort of stale formulas if you've gone to one recently you've probably run into a few of these practically every business that i have ever visited has the exact same set of themes there's a murder mystery room an asylum setting pirates usually a ghost or haunted mansion these are all fine but they start to get old real fast if you're gonna use a pre-made room mix it up a little bit throw a creative spin on it like if it's just a generic ghost hunting room try changing the characters or the storyline a little bit so it's about some kind of i don't know local legend specific to your location combine off the rack challenges or create multiple stages within them even something simple like just re-skinning an old puzzle with a new theme can help keep the experience fresh boring rooms lots of times that i go to escape rooms i walk through the door and i am like immediately let down by the lack of production value one of the first times i ever went to an escape room it had this train station theme the mission was that we had to search through a bunch of like luggage and suitcases to find some rare artifact from a world-renowned treasure hunter the poster outside of the room looked really cool but when we walked in it was an office white walls totally undecorated huge red stickers placed around power outlets to make sure that we didn't electrocute ourselves needless to say i did not feel immersed even something simple like putting up train station wallpaper would have helped look i get that businesses have budgetary restrictions but if my group is going to shell out 300 bucks to be there can't you make the room just a bit more interesting to look at a good solution is to just work within your limits like if you don't have the props and set dressing to pull off a spaceship theme don't do it if your physical building just looks like a generic office come up with a story that matches that or use simple tricks like relighting your room to give the game a better atmosphere when designing a room you should ask does this set dressing take me out of the experience or does it help to immerse me i wish escape rooms these days would go the extra mile to make their rooms memorable or at least charge me less rooms that make no sense your room's theme and storyline should be logical i played a room before where my partners and i were supposed to be fbi investigators who managed to sneak into a serial killer's cabin in search of evidence but in order to get to that evidence we had to go through this series of totally convoluted puzzles that no serial killer would realistically have employed at their private residence so to unlock the door to the kitchen we've got to use a code found in a cell phone that's tucked away in a locked bedside dresser whose combination is found by looking at a stopped clock's reflection from a mirror across the room who organizes their house like that look i get that a certain level of suspension of disbelief is called upon for players to use but if i am a prisoner locked in a jail cell why are the sheriffs leaving the key in a lock box on a counter that can be opened by using a collapsible pole tucked under my bed to type out a number code found in a framed word puzzle on a writing desk in my cell what you and your friends are trapped in a bank vault and the combination can only be found by looking through clues and solving puzzles contained in over a dozen different safety deposit boxes what bank designs a fail-safe like that these plots make no sense some rooms elect to lampshade these hypotheticals and they just play it for laughs or even better yet they create characters to try and justify these kind of weird design choices like maybe the villain is the riddler or some character that's obsessed with puzzles or a famous cryptographer that's hiding some big discovery these narrative fixes they sort of work but they make a lot of the themes feel one-dimensional the plot underpinning the puzzles needs to make sense scenarios need to feel plausible to some extent a lot of the times the story lines just kind of feel like flimsy excuses to lock people together in a room and have them solve puzzles which brings me to a huge pet peeve and that is puzzles that betray the narrative does the puzzle feel like it belongs in the room the world of the room it needs like an internal logic to me puzzles shouldn't feel like they were created by somebody outside of the world the biggest giveaway to me that a room is going to be lackluster when i walk into it is when i look and i see that the locks don't match the theme nothing makes me roll my eyes as a player more than walking into a pirate-themed room and seeing a bright neon-colored word combination lock what is that doing there if we are in ancient egypt the coffin that i'm trying to open should not have a high school gym locker on it obviously right your locks and your puzzles need to make sense in the environment why am i doing a morse code challenge in a fantasy middle-earth setting morse code doesn't exist in a world that doesn't have electricity astronauts don't have to win simon says to access their piloting systems ancient egyptians would not use english word puzzles especially not on laminated computer paper so the fix is that when designing puzzles be sure that they make sense in the environment objects in the room and reasons for encoding them they need to feel natural to the world and while some imagination is necessary on the part of the player i don't know shell out 10 bucks more for a period appropriate log right bad puzzles i can't stand bad puzzles a good puzzle will tell you in its design how it can be solved bad puzzles just kind of make you fend for yourself players need to be given all the tools necessary to solve a particular puzzle within the room i see escape rooms that break this rule all the time any kind of puzzle that requires knowledge of concepts outside of the room is bad this includes any puzzles that are based on things like pop culture math literature or history anything like crosswords trivia puzzles rubik's cubes chess challenges these are bad puzzles because they're inaccessible for a lot of players they contain concepts and require learning curves that players they simply don't have time for stop doing morse code puzzles it doesn't matter if you put the key in the room they're just annoying for your code word lock don't do an obscure alice in wonderland reference because not everybody has read it or will understand it not everybody knows the rules to chess so don't make a game-critical puzzle where they have to find the right move on a chessboard to advance your goal as a game designer isn't to stump the players it's to provide an entertaining and fulfilling experience color puzzles should be avoided because colorblind players can't solve them sudoku puzzles should be avoided because not everyone can do math speaking of numbers counting puzzles don't do them if you have a three-digit lock in your room and you decide to make a player count 147 stars on a wall to solve it your room is really bad puzzles like that aren't challenging they're time wasters they aren't fun they don't make me feel clever for solving them and they just mess up a room's pacing speaking of which rooms with poor pacing so when playing games there's this concept called flow it's the sweet spot between feeling bored and feeling overwhelmed nobody likes rooms where the puzzles are way too easy and you just cruise through them but people also don't like puzzles that are so complicated that they spend the entire time stuck so good escape rooms should keep players in this flow state by progressively getting more challenging as they get closer to the end you want to design a room with goldilocks pacing something that's not too hard but not too boring and it's going to be hard to ensure your room's overall puzzle map maintains this so about puzzle maps when you're building an escape room you first have to map out how the game is going to be played if you get this step wrong it doesn't matter how cool the decorations are the room won't work good escape rooms have multiple puzzles that multiple players can work on at once so that everybody contributes as the team progresses ever been to an escape room where you can imagine the puzzle map looked like this you found a key used it on a lock found another key used it on a lock found another key and used it in a lock and after about 60 minutes of that you finally found the last key which helped you escape the room probably wasn't very stimulating linear puzzles can feel boring and they often bottleneck the room's flow because if there's only one puzzle to solve at a time most players just end up standing around and watching one person try to solve it rooms with parallel puzzles make sure that multiple players are doing important things at once letting everyone participate and contribute to the end goal of course a game's flow can be tweaked by the person operating things behind the scenes so oftentimes the key to this is to have a good game master bad game masters my two worst escape room experiences were both game master related the first one my wife and i were in this room and were trying to solve this puzzle it was a water challenge which by the way are totally inconsistent and should really never be used in escape rooms but i digress we're paying like 120 dollars to have this 60 minute experience and about 15 minutes in we get totally stuck on this water puzzle the thing is at the very start the game master says you get three hints if you're stuck on a puzzle look at the camera in the room and say we need a hint i'll send one your way as soon as we're stuck we look at the camera and we say we need a hint and nothing happens so we messed around for like 10 more minutes trying to figure out this puzzle we still can't do it so we shout out even louder we need a hint still nothing happens we keep working at it of course at this point we're starting to fight with each other couple more minutes pass my wife finally just shouts out super loud we need a hint and finally finally the tv screen in the room blinks on and there is a hint for a puzzle that we had already solved earlier ah there's a thing in the corner of the screen that shows how many hints you have and it's like boop two left we're like we've already solved that we're on this one we need help please anything to do with this puzzle few minutes later boop finally get another hint and it's for another puzzle that we had already solved now my wife and i are really going at it with each other [Laughter] we're both just standing there staring at the countdown clock watching our money waste away nobody seems to be actually watching the room and tracking our progress long story short when there's like 10 minutes left the game master finally helps us the door to the room opens up the game master she sticks her head in and she's like if you want to play this room you have to hold the button instead of pressing it then she just shuts the door wow we're having fun obviously we fail the room we get out into the lobby and come to find out this girl is like trying to game master five rooms at the same time and she just like wasn't paying attention to our room at all we paid to have that experience so clearly an example of a game master that is not helping enough the second bad escape room experience was the complete opposite in that the game master was helping us way too much we pretty quickly figured out the first puzzle we popped the lock we open it up and we pulled out this object we start looking around it to see what we need to do a game master comes over the intercom and she goes so for that one you're going to want to find the lock that's right there under that shelf and then put that in and then you're going to want to find the code that's on the wall there and we're like oh okay so we do that and we get to the next stage of the puzzle we pull out this magnet ooh a magnet i wonder what this could possibly go to so that magnet it goes on the peacock painting right behind you and that'll give you the key to the dresser oh okay so we escaped the room in record time but it was like we didn't get to play she didn't even give us time to try anything it was not enjoyable if escape rooms are going to survive as businesses they've got to get this part right if your game master is having to juggle four or five different rooms at once this is a sign that your business needs to hire more help if on the other hand your game master is spoiling everything then they need to be retrained just some stuff to think about i don't know this whole thing's probably coming off super whiny look again i don't want to seem too critical this is not a knock on escape room owners i've talked with people who run these experiences and it is incredibly challenging it's hard to do well but by the same token it's also incredibly easy to do it poorly i really love escape rooms you know if you've got a good one then you're gonna have a you're gonna have a ton of fun but i worry that the more popular these things become the lower standards that operators of rooms will have and by extension players expectations will be low too anyway that's my rant just thinking out loud so what's the worst escape room experience that you've had and how would you fix it let me know in the comments also build a website this video is sponsored by squarespace the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful website with no hidden fees squarespace makes it simple to get set up start from one of their beautiful templates and then customize it to your specific needs they offer video and audio blocks to help jump start the aspiring podcaster or videographer and with simultaneous posting they let you get your message across multiple platforms all at once if you want to start an online 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Channel: AustinMcConnell

Views: 698,987

Keywords: austinmcconnell, austin mcconnell, escape room, escape rooms, rant, game design

Id: B-0xodRL7ZE

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021