The evolution of our rooms
Hello world!
This is the beginning of a weekly blog about all things related to puzzles, escape rooms and interactive cinema.
We will take you behind-the-scenes, talking about our design philosophy, our future plans, as well as advice for those building rooms themselves.
To kick things off, we will talk about how our design ideas have developed over the past few years.
The evolution of our rooms
You may have noticed that our tagline “Escape Room” has been replaced by “Interactive Cinema”. This reflects the evolution of our rooms, particularly in terms of immersion and story telling.
In this article we will explain how our own ideas and designs have developed over the past three years.
Pre-Dark Zen: What’s a good puzzle?
The first escape rooms we ever tried (as customers) were lots of fun, but we felt they were driven primarily by the question ‘what’s a good puzzle?’. The physical space of these rooms was essentially just somewhere to house the puzzles and the story or theme tended to be a bit of an afterthought. Though they were typically low budget and low tech, the puzzles themselves tended to be quite difficult and required a lot of escape room experience to solve (in fact, we only managed to complete one room as customers!). Although for escape room veterans they may have been a great challenge, for us newcomers they were not very welcoming.
Dark Zen: A more immersive escape room?
With our first offering, Dark Zen, we tried to create an experience that we would enjoy as customers. We wanted it to be more accessible so we dialled down the difficulty, placing the emphasis on puzzles being fun and satisfying, rather than just difficult. Alongside this, we spent considerable time and energy ensuring that our puzzles fit the traditional Japanese theme of the room, for example with a ‘go’ game, an origami puzzle and a zen sand garden.
We added traditional Japanese music to create more atmosphere and though we were happy with the result, we were still a long way away from creating a true immersive experience.
The Dame and the Diamond: Cinematic story-based puzzle solving
With our second room, there were three areas where we made huge improvements. Firstly, we didn’t want anything in the room to appear “puzzly”. If you were to look around the room, you shouldn’t even be aware that it’s an escape room. It could almost be described as a movie set where the props happen to be puzzles. Secondly, a much more coherent story, fully narrated. The story would develop as you progressed through the game. Completing each puzzle would give you more and more information, and allow the story to progress. Finally, a much bigger focus on music and lighting to enhance the cinematic feel, as well as the narration I just mentioned. Key moments in the story would be punctuated by changes in music and dramatic lighting effects. This was really where the idea of an interactive movie started to become a reality, although there was one main area for improvement.
For Queen and Country: Interactive cinema
While the Dame and the Diamond really does look and feel like a detective movie, we realized that only some of the puzzles gave the feeling of being a detective. With our third room, the primary question was: “what sort of things would a spy do?” Before we even thought about puzzles, props or locations we first thought about all the spy-related activities we’d like to see players do; using hi-tech gadgets, evading guards, killing bad guys, covert surveillance and foiling evil plots. We then built our story and puzzles around this, making sure that everything the player did felt like a part of their mission rather than just a puzzle.
We plan to apply this thinking to all future rooms. It makes designing the room a lot harder but we really think that it’s worth the extra effort! We’re really excited to start working on Dark Zen 2 later this year, and give it the full taiken-gata cinema treatment! We also hope that we can keep on evolving and perhaps the next generation will reveal even more potential for greater immersion, fun and excitement.