We all know about those “Live Puzzle Events” that have been popping up here and there over the past several years, yes? (Forgive me for the lousy term; there doesn’t seem to be a set word for these things yet.) If not, here’s a review by Emily Short about a recent one held at the National Maritime Museum in London. Well, starting in November, there’s going to be a Lupin III themed one in Japan:
I doubt most people here can afford a trip to Japan just for this, but if anyone happens to be in the area while this is going on and wishes to try it, please let us know how it goes!
I hear ‘escape rooms’ the most. (Seattle now has at least four; JB helped set one up in Paris, and mentioned that there were dozens in… I think Bucharest?)
I too have mostly heard “Escape Room.” The Punchdrunk event that Emily reviewed at the link seems to me to be more in line with what I’d call “interactive theatre” (actors, sets, and narrative, generally puzzle-light or impossible to fail).
For what it’s worth, I attended a SCRAP-hosted room in San Francisco and it was terrible. It was a lot of stuff that folks here in particular are likely to find off-putting: utterly unmotivated, unsystematic puzzles with “guess the author’s thinking” leaps of logic to make them “challenging”; poorly-constructed, flimsy props with very little in the way of interesting flavor or style; and a “plot” consisting entirely of a rote horror prop inserted into what was, for my team, the last five minutes of play. I far preferred the independently-produced room we have here in Pittsburgh, which of course still had only a paper-thin plot, but at least had some charming props and satisfying object-manipulation puzzles. They also had a really keen sense of hint timing, delivering us hints pretty much right as we became desperate for them, enabling to squeak through a victory with under a minute left on the clock (thereby fun and thrilling!), whereas SCRAP prides itself in having a very low team success rate (thereby likely to end on a low note for a given team).
The escape room that I’m considering traveling internationally for (okay, it’s actually only the nearest big city away, but it’s across the border!) is the one at Casa Loma.
Oh that’s a shame to hear. I guess I don’t feel too bad about not being able to go now, though! Out of curiosity, what was the theme for the SCRAP game you went to?
Yeah, the explosion of room escapes has led to a pretty wide range of variety, from small-scale labours of love to cheaply-produced franchises with relatively heavy marketing.
I’m OK with low success rates (Puzzle Break in Seattle claims a 15-20% success rate, and is excellent), but adequate in-person guiding and hinting is super-important. (Some humans will always manage to misunderstand your puzzle.)
The other interesting thing, to me, is how design assumptions vary. Puzzle Break makes games for teams of 10-14 people: a great deal of the effort is about social management, communication, seeing the big picture. JB said that Euro escape rooms were typically designed for significantly smaller groups, so cooperation isn’t as complex.
I don’t mind a low success rate in and of itself, necessarily. The low note I mentioned was more along the lines of, “well, I don’t think we could have hoped to have solved that one…” in the case of particularly obscure/mindreadery puzzles.
The SCRAP room I went to was “Escape from the Mysterious Room,” which, yeah, is essentially unthemed. But even within the lack of theme there was no coherence, if that makes sense.