This is a question that most people ask the first time they hear of the interactive real-life escape room games that have taken over North America in the last couple of years. For some reason, people think that an escape room is a panic room built for one, that will make you feel claustrophobic and potentially kill you. It won’t.
Now that we have that out of the way and you on well on your way to booking your first escape room adventure, let me share a little bit about what to expect. Escape Rooms are fast becoming an interesting and common team experience. If you have experienced an Escape Room with your family, friends, social organization, sports team, school, summer camp or corporation, you have first-hand experience. If you would like to go to an adventure, like Escape Room Zagreb and beat your fear, but you're reluctant, here are a few things you need to know.
Escape rooms have grown in popularity in the past few years and this paper looks into what constitutes an escape room, their appeal, and the skills applied in playing a game. At their core, escape rooms are games in which players need to complete a series of challenges to win. Where the first generation of escape rooms focused on difficult logic puzzles, escape rooms today have now evolved into fully immersive environments with high quality props and effects.
Why Escape Rooms? Escape rooms are experiential at their core and appeal to players looking for a non-traditional game. They require a diverse set of skills and knowledge to play and are therefore appealing as corporate exercises for team building. Recently these games have begun to be of interest to educational institutions for the same reason.
In the gaming context, escape rooms can be traced back to (and share elements with) Live Action Role Playing and Alternate Reality Games. In the mid 00’s, digital escape games rose in popularity. Escape rooms share game design issues present in other forms of play as well; from logic puzzles to physical elements found in board games, geocaching, interactive theater and even game shows.
With this context in mind, it is worth considering escape rooms as both an evolution of gaming itself and a logical step within game design culture.
Escape rooms encourage players to think creatively and engage in critical thinking. Solving puzzles and ultimately winning will require individuals to work on the puzzles using multiple approaches to knowledge. For example, one may need to work on a math problem, but then proceed to visually processing a circuit and finally end up classifying a series of objects.
Escape rooms differ with the challenges it gives to players, but each escape room encourages players to think differently, unconventionally, and from a new perspective!