This post is a bit of a first for Review The Room, it’s the first post that we’ve published that has actually been written by a guest blogger. This post is written by Alan Coo, someone well known and well respected (well we think so) in the escape room community. He first posted this on the UK Escape Room Enthusiasts group, but we thought it was too good to be lost in Facebook so we asked Alan if he would be happy for us to post this on our our site – fortunately he said yes!
What do you think about this list? Anything you think should be added? Let us know in the comments.
So here are the musings of Mr Alan Coo…
⭐ Things Escape Rooms Need To Stop Doing in 2022 ⭐
Whilst everyone else was out celebrating New Year’s Eve I was sat at home with Covid, so I accidentally wrote a thing.
This is supposed to be looking forwards rather than critical and I hope it’s taken in the spirit it’s intended.
In no particular order:
LACK OF NARRATIVE
Time was that an escape room was “here’s a bunch of puzzles, solve them, win” with some tenuous bookending to explain why you’re in a prison / laboratory / cheese shop / whatever. I want to play games which tell a story, where the story drives the game forwards. Let’s see some characters, revelations, love interests, plot twists; let’s have an interactive movie experience! Surely this is a shoo-in for crime scene games, murder-mystery scenarios and the like? “You’re in a room, you have 60 minutes to escape” just doesn’t cut it anymore.
DEATH BY PADLOCKS
I’m almost loath to include this as I love padlocks. The second game I ever played was like an explosion in a padlock factory and I was in hog heaven. But a room full of locks has been done now, and all too often it’s been done badly. Get the key to open the lock to get the key to open the lock to get the key to… Getting a 4-digit code and scrambling your team to start dialling it into several otherwise unremarkable padlocks was fun… five years ago.
Which leads us into:
LACK OF SIGNPOSTING
If a game does lend itself to (eg) multiple similar combo locks, then give us some signposting to correlate the solution back to the relevant lock. We bemoan a player who spins for the final digit of a combination, yet by design expect them to discover which lock a new code is applicable to via trial-and-error. This is a dichotomy.
LACK OF FEEDBACK FOR SOLVES
We enter a correct code and then a door silently opens behind us. All very clever, but we don’t actually realise that we’ve solved it so we keep on plugging in codes. Give us an audio chime or something, then we can move on to worrying about what we’ve just achieved.
On multi-part metapuzzles, say there’s four puzzles each giving a part of a code. We enter the code and find it’s wrong. So… we’ve got to rework all four parts to find out where we made a mistake. “BZZT part two is incorrect,” or even “BZZT three out of four correct” is an improvement. Players are like puppies, you’ve got to reward us when we do good or we get disheartened and pee on the rug.
Similarly with a blacklight. Please don’t make the scope of search “the entire room.” With two minutes left on the clock. With the main room lights still on. My cat hates you.
‘DO NOT TOUCH’ STICKERS
Nothing smashes immersion faster than “this is not part of the game” stickers. If it’s not part of the game, why can I see it? Why can I interact with it? Chase cables into walls or, if you’re on a budget, box it off. Plywood and paint ain’t expensive.
EXPECTING PUSH-ACCESSIBILITY RATHER THAN PULL
I’ve previously suggested that players speak up ahead of a game if they have specific accessibility requirements such as bad knees or asthma and I stand by this. But I’ve realised suddenly, this is arse-backwards. The venue should be pulling this information from the team as part of the safety briefing, not expecting players to push it to them.
More than once we’ve struggled in an area such as lighting or crawlspaces and been told afterwards “oh, you should’ve said, there’s a bypass!” which was great comfort after my partner had almost put her back out. It took us several games to realise that changing game parameters was often a possibility.
LACK OF PLAYER AIDS
Please, for the love of Pete, give us something to write with. I promise we won’t scribble on the walls or eat the crayons. If you’re in a town surrounded by savages, LCD writing tablets (Boogie Boards) are a thing. Also, please tether the pen / stylus to the board or give us a clip, I swear I spend half a game sometimes trying to remember where I’ve abandoned it!
If there’s maths, give us a calculator. Bonus: this also dodges the BODMAS Bullet. If we need torches (flashlights) or blacklights then one light per team is rubbish unless we only need to send one person off on their own to go do something. Let’s have one each (at least), ideally with working batteries…
“YOU HAVE THREE CLUES”
Come now. A team needs as many hints as it needs. An experienced team might not need any, an inexperienced one might practically need a walkthrough. What this is doing is setting up new players to fail because they’re scared to ask for help in fear of ‘wasting’ a hint.
The other cheek of this butt is:
“PRESS THIS BUTTON / SCAN THIS CODE FOR A CLUE”
You’re not watching the game, are you? This is just inexcusable, a team and its GM are symbiotic. Splitting a GM across multiple games is bad enough, not watching at all is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Both make for a poor player experience.
NO GM OVERRIDES
Technology is great, when it works. When it doesn’t, what are you going to do? A team enters a code correctly but a bit too quickly / slowly for the automated system to recognise it, the GM should be able to hit the big red button to let them continue.
We’ve all played games where staff have had to run into a room to address something. It happens, sure, but should this then not prompt a review by the venue: “why did this happen and how do we prevent it from happening again”?
SPLIT-SECOND FAILURES
If a team solves the room at a time of 60:01, find a way to let them have it. Otherwise, you’ve just turned an exciting skin-of-the-teeth Hollywood-blockbuster climax into a demoralising failure. I’ve had a couple of these where we’ve metaphorically turned the key in the exit door but not quite opened it as the clock ran out, only to be met with “sorry, you lost.” Oh.
You can see the team’s progress (you can, right?), so if they’re right on the cusp of completion then maybe stop the clock at 59:58? Or allow surprise bonus time thematically, “you got lucky, the serial killer had to go for a pee, you escaped with a time of 60:05!”
If you are going to have a split-second failure, then maybe have teams “win the Bad Ending” rather than have an outright fail. Eg, a bomb defusal, have FX of the bomb going off. Hell, do this for all failures, it’s cool.
I’m told some hosts cheat with the clock. Please don’t do that, keep it honest.
DIFFICULTY BY DARKNESS
My #1 pet peeve. Lighting is powerful and mood lighting is essential to creating an atmospheric game. Lighting is not a means of making things arbitrarily more awkward. Spending the entire game in half-light squinting at locks going “is that an 8 or a 6?” or trying to differentiate between red and orange under a dim amber light is not ambient lighting, it is simply annoying.
PROCESS PUZZLES AND PUNISHING PLAYERS
(Or: “a nifty bit of alliteration”)
Out of the gate here: actual gametime time penalties can get in the sea. We’ve paid for that time.
Safes which will accept x code attempts before a y-minute lockout, this just scares teams out of trying correct codes. OK, this may be a manufacturer’s security restriction but that being the case, maybe have some other method of validating the code first so that they have confidence?
Sometimes we need to work through a process and that’s fine. Sometimes we’re made to work through a process again and again and again and, eh, that’s not as fine.
Ask yourselves the Three F’s™: Is it fair? Is it fun? Or is it frustrating?
Thanks for reading.
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