I tried the Marion County Jail escape room. They just put me in a room with no keys and no puzzles and the dungeon master wouldn’t give up a single clue and didn’t release me for 6 years. 3/5
One of the coolest escape rooms I've been to was run by a cat shelter as a fundraiser. It was a cat-related theme (so original that it's the only thing that comes up when you google it and I don't want to dox myself) but the shelter director wrote it herself and you could tell she was passionate about it. It was awesome to see her combining these two passions to make a fundraiser I'd actually want to go back to.
The best escape room I can remember was one taking place in an abandoned submarine at the bottom of the ocean with important papers about a russian invasion. And there was some sort of gas leak that needed to be fixed before continuing the investigation; so at the start of the adventure, the whole team needed to wear a gasmask that was super limiting in terms of vision. It was pitch dark and we needed flashlights to navigate the room. It was just so great thematically and put us right into the mood of the game. But the great thing is: all the puzzles were contextualised by the submarine. It was all about opening sectors, decompression, restarting the engines etc. to let us access other parts of the main room.
I feel like Escape Rooms seem to be artificially limiting themselves to the "Escape a Room" premise, probably because it's the most economical (small sets, no actors), but I think there's tons of potential for a premium experience leaning more into general interactive theater. SuperBunnyHop has a great video where he describes going to a limited time only "Metal Gear Solid" escape room which was basically a stealth game in real life. Crawl around, avoid guards who were actors in the environment, and even hide in lockers with the exact same slot peep holes as in the games. Him describing that experience might be the most jealous I've ever been of anyone in my life.
I mean, I live on an island thats underdeveloped and even we have escape rooms with guards acting as zombies and time limits.. like is that not the standard?
That escape room reminds me of the old game, "Hacker II", where you would use robots to break into a facility to unlock a safe. You would have access to the security cameras and be able to record and play back to fool anybody watching the physical screen. This sounds better than a computer game can be, but that is the point: the game was immersive even though it was run on old technology. That room that you describe sounds exciting. It would be more exciting if you could combine it laser tag, where the guards had incentive to shoot.
"Your set dressing should be immersive" I went to an escape room that was office-themed, and at the time it didn't occur to me that the theme could've been chosen to be more economical; I simply thought that they did a good job at making it feel like an office. Another economical one was that we were musicians but we were locked out from getting on stage, so we were stuck backstage.
I feel like there's so much possibility with office themed rooms since nostalgia can be a big aesthetic appeal - like using voicemails, 80s office decor, old computers, etc etc would be soooo cool. And the materials to dress the set can be found in every thrift store.
We had a group of 4 one time and we were doing great. This was the “most challenging” room at the establishment according to them. Anyway, we were doing great. Like 15 minutes in and only two steps away from the exit. We got stuck on this pyramid puzzle and we asked for a hint and they gave us a hint, and then another, and another. We spent about 40 minutes on this one puzzle and we eventually failed the room because we couldn’t get past it. At the end when the GM came into the room, they said “oh you’re missing a piece” and the piece was OUTSIDE the room. They forgot to reset it correctly. Terrible experience, but we got our money back.
I would say that, in addition to being a mistake, was also a Bad Game Master. If one of my players struggled on something for that long I would have paused the time and stepped in to make sure something wasn't wrong. It happens so often that players pocket keys, stuff gets reset wrong or not at all, and sometimes thing just plain don't work when they should that I would assume you aren't the problem and the game is.
@@TheTruthx58 The exact same thing happened to me in an escape room, except no refund. just a whoops sorry, have an extra 10 minutes in the room, even though we forgot to reset a clue that stalled you guys for 25 minutes.... and it was the very first clue too XD
I had a similar experience where I found a string tucked behind a drawer and when we got out the GM was like "omg we've been looking for that every where, we just thought someone stole it." and they were just gonna let people keep playing the room without a crucial part of the puzzle?!
@@kaitlynchiostri1605 Yes, and if you found it while playing and managed to finish the room then it wasnt as important, you cannot stall another's person's game looking for something that isn't vital to the room that could've perfectly been stolen
So I've actually worked as a game master last year, and I generally agree with you. The only thing I'm a bit opposed to is the "No puzzles on laminated paper"-pet peeve. Because yeah, it feels a bit weird to find things like that in a jungle-setting. Then again, do keep in mind that about 30% of people act like actual gorillas when they're inside the room. So the things have to be durable. Also, the game masters have to desinfect the interior of the room and reset it in about 15 minutes each time. Non-laminated scrolls and postcards will be fucking destroyed in about half a day.
there are other ways to write things down durably. You could use a clay slab, for a ancient Egyptian room, or engrave symbols in clear ceramic tiles. These would be more expensive for the escape room, but they are one time purchases, which enhance the experience, and if I'm paying 50$ per person I expect nothing less. It is a premium experience.
@@accountid9681 the clay stuff is great in theory, but I’ve also worked as a game master and having stuff that “fits the theme more” often leads to more replacements. We’ve done clay chess pieces or resin candy and all have ended up broken. All it take is one butter fingers and something that has the possibility of shattering absolutely will break. If you go the plastic route it feels just as ingenuine as the laminated sheets. We’ve even printed things on canvas and had groups smudge the ink with sanitiser or write on them with whiteboard markers. Sometimes something that’s easy to replace is often the best option, at least for my non-franchise workplace. (Not that we didn’t have replacements for the above but you do get through them)
@@accountid9681 everything we gamemasters joke about has happened. I kid you not, we put a couch in the first room of a cabin-themed room and someone ransacked another players purse, found a pocket knife, and tore open the couch…. What?!
@@isabelconti4950 As a DM for D&D who dabbles in making terrain where people know I'm watching them, they still sometimes do stupid shit with it. I think that lamination is lame, but the only way to avoid this issue would be to require a deposit it feels like.
My favorite experience with an escape room was one in which our group of 10 was split into 2 groups. The 5 who were more "Right Brain" and the 5 who were more "Left Brain". The groups were in two separate (but combined through holes in the wall) rooms. Each room had similar puzzles that we needed to work together to solve (which was hard with only vocal communication). The set design was amazing too. Right brain room had bright colors and random patterns, bean bag chairs, and such, the left brain was all black and white, fancy chairs, math related things. When we had the chance to see each other's room both groups just ran around exploring because we had so much fun finally seeing what the others were talking about. It was amazing.
@@tetrofita1787 It was up to the group to decide who goes into which group. We had people who were a mix of the two, and we just balanced it out evenly.
I had a similar split the group experience. Spy themed, where we have to stop a mad scientist’s dirty bomb. each team had a walky talky to chat with the other team, and lab notes etc in one room often became inputs to the other room’s puzzles. Some puzzles even undid locks in the other room, mostly to keep the groups progressing at the same pace I assume. The room culminated with one large room the group met back up in. VERY on theme, and the puzzles were fantastic. The split was roughly described as physical puzzles vs mental puzzles, so we just all picked whether we’d have more fun as a tinker or a thinker.
One time I was doing a 30 minute escape room, and my friend and I got stuck on one puzzle at around 19 minutes. We went over it several times, repeating the rules to ourselves, looking at it from different angles, etc. We finally had to ask for a clue, and the clue indicated that we needed to do exactly what we had been doing. Eventually, the time ran out and we lost. On our way out, I asked the GM was the solution was, and it turns out we had solved it on our third try, but electrical problems caused it to malfunction. Even worse, she confirmed that it was the final puzzle of the game, and based on when we had attempted that solution, we could’ve placed on a leaderboard. We still technically won the room, I guess, but it was really broke the immersion and left us feeling cheated.
Oof. I had a similar problem with an escape room I went to - it had one of those puzzles where you need to get a specific volume of water and you've only got containers of other volumes. We got the right solution, (as a staff member confirmed) but the computer didn't recognise it for some reason. By the looks of it it had some kind of flow measuring equipment to determine if you got it right, no idea why they used that instead of just using measuring the weight.
@@phelpysan Possibly to keep you from just putting a certain weight of anything on the scale to bypass the puzzle? I dunno how it was set up, just a guess as to why they didn't.
I've owned and ran an escape room for about five years now and have seen a few other ones pop up in my town and disappear since we opened. One only used pre-fab kits you can order and we heard a lot of complaints about how their hints made no sense or didn't relate to where they were stuck. Prime example of buying a set of puzzles the manager didn't actually understand. One that lasted a bit longer had some really cool rooms, some of them purchased but they went the extra mile to really dress up their rooms. They only lasted about a year and a half because they were hemorrhaging money the entire time they were open. I like to believe we stayed open for two main reason, we made all of our own stuff, props, puzzles, decor, everything was made in house by us so our rooms were truly unique. Second we ran it like a business rather then a hobby. Yeah motorized doors, actors, ceiling to floor decorations are all cool but we are in a town of only 60k people so we know we can't afford to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a room. Our average budget is about 1-2k for a room. We prowl garage sales and thrift stores all the time and repurpose everything we don't build from scratch to be smart with our money. I'll admit sometimes the rooms may look a bit 'cheap' but hey of the five escape rooms that have come through the place we were the first and we're the only one still open. As a side note the hardest part of puzzle design is something painfully obvious to one group doesn't make a lick of sense to another. We have rooms where the success rate is below 25% but will occasionally get a group that finishes then in twenty minutes. Likewise we'll have rooms with a success rate over 95% and you'll get a group that barely makes it halfway. Putting difficulty ratings on the rooms helps gear them towards veterans and newbies but it is crazy hard to come up with a puzzle that is doable for most without being impossible to some and painfully obvious to some others.
I'm in school for computer science and have a hobby of playing with electronics. I really want to open an escape room because I feel like I can have high tech electronics for super cheap and make an awesome experience.
I feel like you definitely found the way to manage the balancing act of running this sort of business! I live in a similarly sized town and have seen several pop up and disappear pretty quickly and they all suffered from the things you described. One room was kinda obvious they'd blown the budget buying several pieces of new furniture and then the rest of the room was very poorly thrown together with very tacky items.
Not sure how feasible it is for you but I actually cranked up the difficulty when I heard my players saying they were bored. They got a longer word puzzle with a less common word. Or some extra pieces to sort through. Especially easy with digital stuff or if there's easy access to rooms the players haven't gotten to yet. Or vice versa, easy word or some excuse for extra minutes like the getaway driver calls like "Are you done? The cops are closing in...Fine, I'll buy you a few extra minutes *tires squeal*". To me the main thing is keeping it that medium challenge level so they stay engaged and have a good experience.
See, ive actually gone to an escape room place that actually was an entire VR escape room. You walked around with a big laptop on your back and tried to fix this space station it was pretty unique
I did one of those, too. Didn't really enjoy it tho, but maybe that's just me. Escape rooms have - IMO - a lot to do with holding stuff in your hands and examining it closely, or fiddling with mechanical devices, trying every possible way some two things could fit together. In VR you lose a lot of those elements, just by nature of the technological restrictions. I could just as well play a puzzle game at home without paying 60 bucks per person for an hour... On the other hand, the same place also has a 3v3 PVP VR shooter, that one is absolutely amazing!
Oh hey, I have kinda the same thing here, though it's not space but instead an assassin creed's thingy where you escape a pyramid. Never tried it, but it looks cool
I’m from France. Strangely I don’t have the same feeling here. The level of quality in our escapes are getting higher and higher. The market is so competitive that only extra qualitative escapes are succeeding (last one in date was yesterday “the nautilus” by unleash escape, they called it a “narrative experience”, “not really an escape room”.
To be fair, you're comparing the idea of Escape Rooms within France. Try comparing those same rooms and ideas to other countries in Europe. Now try making all of those unique and equally engaging. Now do that for 50 countries. Then, and only then, can you truly try to compare as though you're on par with the USA's problem with "this state is good and this state isn't".
"Not everyone knows the rules to chess." Now here's an interesting idea for a medieval setting. Use rules to chess that very few or NO people understand, and make figuring out the rules from clues in the room important.
@@revimfadli4666 I don't think that somebody who plays chess would not have heard of en passant... Even i know what it is and i am not a chess player at all.
Probably my worst experience in an escape room is an issue that you didn’t even cover. I was playing an outer space themed escape room with my family. The four of us were paired with a this couple that had clearly done the escape room before and were just trying to get a new personal high score. We could barely do anything because we had no idea what was going on.
They should never put two groups together. We were stuck with this woman, her mother, and her son. She literally destroyed the entire room, ripped pictures off of walls even though they told us not to, and basically mixed everything up by grabbing all of the items and setting them on the table making it impossible to solve the puzzles. It was infuriating. We failed. That was the last time I’ve done an escape room.
I'm guessing these companies are doing cash grabs, getting as many people into each room as possible, even if it means combining groups. When I've done them, it's always been my group, no one else in the room with us. If you can't book a room for your party and no one else, don't do it imo.
@@christophercrawford2736 I guess 1) you've been lucky, and 2) you're only backing up what the other person said about ensuring you don't go somewhere that puts you with another group. Tbh I appreciate the insights that most places are good but you should still check
I think the next level for these kinds of rooms is to complicate the game, make it more like a RPG. Have interactive consequences. Imagine if you are playing as prisoners aboard an alien spaceship, and through a window in a nearby room you can see an alien trying to keep you in the room, while you work to escape it. That might be a little more fun for the GMs, as they'd have a couple things to try, varying the game each time.
its like being tricked into larping then, ideally, realizing the fun of a roleplaying session. i cannot vouch, however, for larping, i haven’t done it or done any research on it :)
What frustrates me is the lack of escape rooms that allow one player. I don't mind if I have to pay double or more to play alone, but I want the challenge sometimes. In SoCal it was so hard to find an escape room that allowed a single player. Thanks to Reddit I found Mob Accountant, which was great as a single player! The only two flaws were that I used a hint for a lock combination I got right, I just didn't know how to open the lock (I think I should have gotten that free since I solved the puzzle), and the game is about not just escaping, but collecting as much money as possible before leaving, only there's no way to gauge how close you are to escaping. If I had known I was about to be done, I would have looked for more money before finishing, since I had time left. Still, it was well worth it. Single player games are so fun.
Well, i've been struggling for 23 years to escape my parents house. They do make a very good escape room, what's with the not having to pay rent and all that
My mum made me start paying "board" as soon as I got my first part time job whilst still at school!! At the time she wanted 1/3rd of my $24 per week, in the 80's, which I then thought sucked but now it's more like 3/4's which really sucks!!
I think my favorite escape room experience was the time my group accidentally solved several puzzles WAY out of order because the GM underestimated us. The game had us playing as super spies trying to reconstruct how a mysterious occultist had gone missing, and the room was set up as the missing guy's study, including a full bookcase. Because half of us were drunk and half were sober (one person had skipped the pub crawl, another was pregnant, and I don't really drink), we divided up labor accordingly, giving Team Sober the most fiddly, detail-oriented tasks and assigning Team Drunk to gently ransack the place for clues. While my friends spread out, looking at the art on the walls or the papers on the desk, I went right to the books and singled out the ones least likely to have been bought by the foot or by the pound, noting which were actual old books with real titles and which were likely to be made up for the game. (I spent a lot of weekends in used bookstores as a kid, used to volunteer in a library, and am low-key obsessed with the minutiae of book repair, etc.) I ended up pulling out the most likely plant, flipping through it, and finding a clue that clearly connected to something we hadn't found yet. I presented the clue immediately because it had seemed easy to me, and easy puzzles come first, right? Apparently the bookcase puzzle was supposed to happen later and take a lot longer, especially with a group that was half drunk. And that was before the "mysterious incantation" on a wall turned out to be plain old Latin. (Team Sober included a classics nerd, who had to be restrained from correcting the grammar.) Apparently we'd been given a room that was thought to be challenging for a bachelorette party (which we were), and six women (three drunk) swanning in with feather boas and silly hats didn't seem all that well-equipped. We didn't mention when booking that the group included a librarian, a researcher, and multiple teachers, along with people who had picked up lots of weird knowledge or skills for various reasons. Ironically, solving the initial puzzles out of order made the final "magic ritual" harder because, not having a strong sense of which puzzles were supposed to be easy and which more difficult, we kept getting the steps out of sequence. I have a lot of sympathy for game designers now. In hindsight, a half-drunk crew of fairly esoteric nerds in boas and plastic crowns is no one's ideal audience. I was just glad there wasn't a wasn't a chess puzzle. None of us knew how to play chess.
Thankfully not all chess puzzles actually require you to know how to play chess, Eg a scenario I'm going at the moment, long term build as huge learning curve, has a chess board in it but it's connected to another puzzle which just gives you the hint on where to move the piece to next, to open an 8 character wooden combination lock box.
The best escape room experience I had was in a room themed after a garage sale. We had to puzzle out the most valuable piece in the room (a task that involved getting combos for all the safes, so we could see what was inside them as well as finding all the secret compartments in furniture).
@@austinmcconnell Fuzzy Logic in Downers Grove, Illinois. I went to middle school with the boyfriend of one of the co-owners, so when they were testing their rooms for opening, myself and a group of friends got to try them out. The garage sale worked perfectly. The casino-themed room (find the golden chip) needed some tweaks. But that was years ago, so I bet the room's well-tuned now.
I had an escape room that needed us to solve an extremely hard Sudoku puzzle to get a number for a code. And, it was a room without lights and they only gave us one tiny flashlight. Which means while the person is solving the puzzle others can’t really search for other clues.
I really disliked the one room I did because it was too small physically for the group I was in and didn't have enough puzzles, but more importantly; The room was really dark and had two"torches" (it was magic/sorcery themed) and we had to be in the dark for like, the first 3 puzzles. It made the small room even smaller.
@@austinmcconnell by the way, you mention Sudoku in the video. Sudoku doesn't involve math as you mentioned. I suggest mentioning a correction in the description and in a pinned comment.
@@unliving_ball_of_gas yes, it is, and I think that there are techniques that might use math, but normally, Sudoku doesn't involve any adding. When creating these puzzles, you can replace the numbers with letters, words, pictures, or symbols, and then the player should still be fairly comfortable solving it in the same way.
I have always wanted to do a purely physical escape room, no puzzles, only physically altering things in a room, like having to craft a lockpicking set out of light bulbs. I think that would be soooo fun.
You definitely should ive been to one where I had to travel back on forth in this trolly on like a very narrow pathway and god I had so much fun, and this one simple but I had to match smells to a scent to figure out the puzzle
Hey, I ran thousands of escape rooms at the largest venue in the United States for years. Some thoughts: 1) you have to keep in mind that parts need to be easily replaceable. This is why you get the high school lock on the ancient Egyptian puzzle. I wish every group was like you and was totally into the concept; unfortunately about 70% of groups at my venue were intoxicated after a certain time of night and would damage objects in the room constantly. 2) the name “escape room” should really be changed to “puzzle room.” The former implies the goal of the entire event is to get out by whatever means necessary. Including forcing things open.
Agreed heavily, it’s literally what they are, and I kinda assumed with this day and age theres people who go to escape rooms for fun and theres no issue with that (although it brings really cheap escape rooms and scammish ones) Ive been to a lot of escape rooms and always get the run down of not to grab anything to hastily, and be careful with the objects its tiring but it makes sense on why they are there to begin with.
yeah i dont like how hes calling her an awful game master when its clearly a management issue and she was probably trying her best under the circumstances
Honestly my first thought when he said that was 'Oh god, their coworker(s) probably called off last minute and no one else could come, but the boss just told her to figure it out"
As a game master I do agree, it's not her fault if she has to handle 5 games at a time. It already feels awful when I have to handle 2 qhen someone is sick. Please everyone be considerate of your GM.
Yes, there's definitely a difference between "this isn't being game mastered well" and "they're a bad game master". That woman was probably having a terrible time.
As someone who has been gamemastering for over 3 years now. I've had that experience... Running 5 rooms at once, answering the phone, running the front desk, resetting rooms, giving the intro to other rooms all well running the other games and only getting about 10 seconds to look at the monitor and where they are at... If they did ask for a clue, I would give a clue that seems relvant if they responded with "We did that one already." I would say "Sorry ". I would explain what's going on to the groups after and a lot of them would feel empathic for me. It's not easy and to hear that is quite demeaning...
As a game master at an escape room, after watching this video, I realize I'm pretty spoiled working at a place that doesn't have any of these issues with the games. Like, as an employee I can actually vouch for our games, like, they're actually good.
As for worst game mastering experience at the last escape room I worked at there was one time I had to convince a very angry family that they didn’t want to do our escape room because the building next to us was in fact on fire and our room was filling with smoke. I’ve also had a guy bring a knife to the room so he could pick locks and he ended up cutting himself. Please don’t be these people. game mastering is fun but also really really hard. So if you enjoyed your experience please consider tipping us since our hours are bad and we don’t get payed much 😅
I don't understand people who try to pick locks during games. They're paying for a gaming experience... what is the point of skipping through all the elements of the game just to reach the end sooner? They're robbing themselves.
@@austinmcconnell apparently he had never done an escape room before so he thought he had to do whatever was in his power to escape. He didn’t know there were puzzles😂
That first bad experience sounds really frustrating, but trying to run 5 games at once would be impossible. That's not necessarily a bad gamesmaster (although they might be), that's bad hiring policies.
Yup. We don't let our game masters run more than three rooms at once. If there's only one GM working and three rooms are booked for a given time slot, we actually close the fourth room for that slot. On weeknights there are plenty of empty slots so we're not losing much business, and it makes for a better experience all around. On weekends we schedule enough staff to run all the rooms at once.
@@itzac Lol at our place there is one game master per room at all times, and now that ive experienced such premium treatment i do gotta admit it sucks having being asked "yo where you at in the room?"
@@MultiPaco06 we watch closely enough that we only have to ask if a particular puzzle is out of view of the cameras. And there are only a few instances of that. I'm more concerned about players having to wait for a response.
@@itzac One person shouldn't be running more than one game. That's just a way to get out of paying three people to provide a personal experience for each rooms players. Plus, now one person is dealing with three groups of people showing up at random times, checking in three sets of people, going over rules, bringing each group in to their room. That's going to overwork the GM, and diminish the player's experiences more often. Our place has GMs on-call, so if a room books, they get called in (with a two hour lead), and if need be, the owners will come in and run a game.
@@Grand_Works our 4.9 Google rating would seem to indicate that our players are very happy with their experiences. We are also able to accommodate walk-ins and back-to-back games this way, and we can provide our employees with a reliable schedule. We also start our games at longer intervals when we only have one GM, specifically to make signing in and launching less chaotic.
I had a game master get upset with my group for solving the puzzles the “wrong way” once. He passive aggressively had us reset the puzzle, which had way too few permutations to not accidentally solve. Bad puzzle and bad gamemaster
that was stupid. there was one time my friends did an escape room and one of my friends solve it completely different from the puzzle and the the gamemaster was so confuse, but thought it was funny.
When I did one of the cheap one room ones at a mall, when we got out they checked to make sure we opened every lock and didn't figure something out ahead of when we technically were suppose to. (I.e try a code on a poster to a lock and open it before we opened the chest that gave us the clue to point to the poster)
@@stevennguyen8935 Hey, if you figure out a way to solve a puzzle that isn't technically how you solve the puzzle, you've still solved the puzzle and it counts. As a game master, as long as you don't break anything, it counts!
I remember during a highschool trip we went to this escape room place where there had to be at least 4 students per room. My favorite one was a room where me and my friends were stuck, the walls were white and engraved with inspirational messages. An intercom played ambient music and a voice saying things like “you are the key,” and “this room can only be solved by you.” Eventually we found out every single “you” in the wall was a shallow button, and we all had to push one at the same time to open it.
See, what works about that in that it's really smart comedy. inspirational posters can be maddeningly impersonal feeling. And they tend to be very individualistic, whereas this puzzle is solved by the collective --all of "you" in the group. Someone thought a thing here. I would LOVE to know what inspired that.
As someone who’s built a few rooms for my college, I completely agree with this video. Aligning theme and location and props and tech and team size and hint systems and administration was incredibly difficult. That said, they asked me to do it again so I guess they liked it 😊
I had an idea for an escape room called "escape from margaritaville" where its all tiki bar themed, and you have an hour to escape or you're trapped forever in a room playing Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville" on loop. The final key you need to escape would be in the "lost shaker of salts".
What makes it hard to complete in time is the unlimited margarita slush machine in the room with you. - Wait - the salt shaker is inside and you have to drink the machine empty to find it.
It also could have you playing a lot of games like pool or darts. The dart board could have a button or some wire activared by the metal tip or the dart and you have to stick it in a hole in the dart board. Pool could also have the billards hiding something in them.
Escape rooms could learn a thing from classic Adventure Game puzzle design. It's effectively the same sort of scenario (although limited by what's realistically possible, of course), the major difference being that Adventure Games use puzzles to give the players the experience of going on an adventure, whereas Escape Rooms use adventures to give the players the experience of solving a puzzle. Like, I can buy a Sudoku book for $5 no problem. I don't pay $100 to get locked in a room and solve 10 of them, I pay $100 to experience a setting, tone, and adventure.
Hey! I would love to throw in some input as someone who has worked at an escape room and currently working at another one. Some of the ideas you have are great in theory, but would ultimately fail in practice. Laminated papers are a must. It lets them last longer and protects them from more rough groups. There really isn’t a way to make word locks in more theme to the room unless they’re custom made. And at the place I work at now we have three back ups to every lock so it would just be too much money. We do our best to make sure everything is in theme, but it all comes down to money in the end. Again, I think you make great points. I can see from an outsiders perspective how these might seem simple, but as an employee they aren’t as practical as one might think. If you have any questions about the workings of an escape room please send them my way! I would love to answer!
Yes, so true! People who haven’t worked in an escape room may not realise how often things get broken 😅 Everything needs to be durable & easily/economically replaced!
Totally understand your points but what's the furthest course of action you can take from the people damaging the room's props/puzzles/decor whether intentionally or accidentally? Surely the waiver should account for some compensation in loss? And does business insurance do anything for this niche industry?
I think this is kind of the point the video is making though - the rooms are designed to be convenient and cheap rather than immersive experiences designed for a specific story. For example, if the setting doesn’t have period appropriate word combination locks, then maybe there shouldn’t be a puzzle based on them in that room. I don’t think anyone is saying it is easy to create a really great experience, just that the first escape rooms were made by really dedicated designers who took these things into account and that the quality has suffered as it’s become more commercialized and business conveniences were prioritized instead.
Can you not have 3D printed decorative cases for the locks? So when the mechanism gets trashed you can swap a new lock into the case. The case may in fact protect the locks a little, saving on replacement costs.
@@im.jintan it’s not just large destruction in rooms, that rarely happens. It’s usually a few groups being rough with a piece of paper and it begins to crumble, or worse, someone writing on it(which means we need a completely new one for the next room). Same for props, there’s always a few rough groups who do damage over time, never one group who goes in and completely trashes the room.
went to a murder mystery type room where it was about a magician and we were “backstage” it was so cool looked like we were actually backstage didn’t solve it cause i went with my friend and our IQs drop like 50 points when we’re together excited to go back to another location with more of my friends :)
A neat spin on the escape room game master dynamic could be if the game master was actually in the room playing a character. Like, perhaps they're an annoying but useful prisoner and you're trying to free them from a jail cell or something. Would make sense for someone like that to know the room pretty well, since they've been locked up there for a while, but also not to readily volunteer that information, because they're annoying. As such, the whole "three hints" system would make sense as a part the experience as opposed to just obviously being an immersion-breaking game mechanic.
i think i saw they had something like this in a conan obrian segment where he did an escape room. the room was 50’s themed? it had a secretary to fit with the plot of the game.
We had that in the one I went to, they didn’t act like they had meta knowledge, just that they were good at finding things/working on puzzles, no true “hints”, but we could ask them for assistance or if we were fighting/super stuck, they were able to intervene.
Yeah, one I went to had a game master like that. Can confirm, she was great at staying in character and very helpful at guiding us through puzzles we were stuck on (or keeping us from making dumb mistakes that would break things).
One time, my boyfriend and I went out for a date night to his first escape room. We did a lot of it together, and it was actually a pretty decent one, but there was one clue that was just so confusing. They had some kind of riddle on the shower wall, and we essentially agreed that the answer to the riddle was "silence" but couldn't figure out what to do with that. We tried to not talk, nothing. Eventually, we asked for a hint and the game master told us that there was a lock with a five-letter combination. Somehow, we were supposed to deduce that "silence", the answer to the riddle, had a synonym- QUIET- that could be put into the lock. But quiet wasn't the answer to the riddle. Silence was. A piece of the riddle was that you can "break" it. Like, breaking silence. But you CANNOT break "quiet". I was infuriated.
Hate to disagree, but "the quiet was broken by...." is a common enough phrase. I don't doubt your claim that maybe the riddle didn't work for quiet in some other way, and its annoying to have a riddle with multiple synonymous answers, but you can break the quiet.
@@aidanbailey9967 , this reply actually hurt my brain to read. You are totally wrong and anyone you have ever heard say that phrase is an idiot (as is the person that was in charge of Chloe Ostiguy's game that said 'silence' and 'quiet' are synonyms). 'Silent' and 'quiet' are synonyms, but 'silence' is not, because 'silence' is a noun (which is why it can be "broken"). 'Silent' and 'quiet', on the other hand, are adjectives and can *NOT* be "broken". I cannot overstate how wrong it is to try and say one can "break the quiet". Chloe Ostiguy is totally justified in her fury against the morons that came up with that puzzle.
@@aidanbailey9967 google the respective phrases 700k results for "quiet was broken" but the first one is literally on a page for silence was broken 9 million results for "silence was broken" If the answer to your riddle could be two words, and the wrong answer is 13x more common than the right one.... you made a bad riddle
There was one puzzle that was absolutely amazing- it was zombie themed, and there was an actual man who stood in a closet and randomly burst out to scare the living daylights out of you. I have zero regrets for grabbing my coworker's hoodie and shoving them in front of me to get eaten first. Sorry Mike.
One time I went to an escape room with a friend and we found a combo lock that we couldn't find the answer for. He tried his locker code for no reason because we were just having fun and he opened the lock with it. After we escaped the supervisor said we skipped 2 or 3 puzzles with that lucky coincide. We laughed about it for hours.
The build to your budget is so incredibly true. We've seen indie films become fantastic by knowing what they have to work with and leaning into strengths. I've gone to two both in my town of Duluth, MN and they were themed perfectly as it was after the college and the harbor.
Oh fuck, we got some of those? I guess makes sense though, duluth is more touristy oriented. Their ain't much up here, so I guess I didn't expect much in the first place
One time, my group skipped half of the escape room because one of our members randomly punched a code into a six-button keypad and it ended up causing us to get the room record. Otherwise, we were definitely not escaping.
I've done some escape rooms with my family and on two occasions we've managed to skip large chunks of the puzzle. On one, the final lock was a directional lock that clearly couldn't have that many combinations. Since the room was so linear it made sense for one person to just stand bruteforcing the final lock since they had nothing else to do and we got it open in a few minutes. After that we went back and did all the puzzles you were meant to do first. On another, we got a code for a lock, but didn't know which it was so we just put it into all of them. In the process of entering it, one of the locks you were supposed to open right at the end just popped open and we skipped most of the room.
We played one that was actually interesting - you're prisoners who are in jail and you have to get yourself out, namely by figuring out how to get things that are outside to you. Or throwing things to the other prisoners through your bars. It was cool.
I once did an escape room that had a broken puzzle. Me and my friends spent 30 minutes trying to solve this puzzle, but nothing we did worked. Once we were done, the gamemaster tried to show us the correct solution to the puzzle (which ended being the first thing we tried when we found the puzzle), then blamed us for breaking it once they realized it didn't work.
Yeah, I don't know why he tied 2 things together that aren't related. Would have made as much sense to say don't use color puzzles because people are bad at math and don't use sudoku puzzles because some people are color blind. Still gave the video a thumbs up.
As an escape room lover, I agree with a lot of this video! As someone who worked in an escape room however, some of the issues are due to the reality of running a business that’s open to the public. Like, of course it’s logical to have locks that match the setting and theme for example, but when you’re having to replace locks, keys, and other props weekly because customers break them or take them, it’s gonna be really hard to keep replacing them on the spot with very specific and pricier pieces. There were multiple occasions where I had to run to a hardware store between games to buy replacements, and we’d ordered a bunch of theme-specific backups already but customers really don’t listen to anything you tell them so they constantly break/lose/take things.
10:10 Colorblind people can still see color, you just have to be careful about your choice of colors. 10:16 Sudoku involves no math. Not even basic arithmetic. You might as well have said someone might not be able to color by numbers because they don't know math.
@@Reashu The rules are very simple, so as long as they're included that should be no problem. If anything, the problem is that too many people already know how to solve Sudoku puzzles and will breeze past them. Then they make the puzzle hard to compensate and make it inaccessible to novices. An obscure or original puzzle format would be ideal, since virtually no one will already be an expert at it.
I was gone for most of the video, mostly uttering to myself “well it isn’t the worst thing ever” until you got to the one where the game master just gave you all the clues and it made my blood boil hard like holy shit
I went to an Escape room once, where in the last puzzle we had to convert a specific color combination into numbers with the help of a note written on the first page of a book we had to skim through for another puzzle. But even though we were certain, that we had the correct colors and had translated them correcly according to the note we found that explicitly said: colors -> numbers, we couldn't solve the puzzle. After some time the game master came in, because he wondered why we were stuck at this fairly simple puzzle, after we had speed run most of the escape room. Turns out, the group before us had left the note with the wrong instructions on how to convert the colors. Ruined the whole experience.
So, a few years back, I went to an escape room for my friend’s birthday. It was in my old home town, using a building that used to be used for something else, and the people there were gaming enthusiasts. My friend chose the hardest room (we never finished it in time) and it was awesome! We were supposed to be making our way through a bomb shelter and the main room was the shelter and they had two rooms next to it, one being a doctors room and the other being a missile launch room. It was so fun. Then almost that same group went to another escape room a year later and it was your usual breaking into a house and stealing money, but it was so boring. They gave us unlimited clues, the puzzles were meh, and the room theming.. or lack there of. It was billed as this nice mansion owned by this really shady business man. The guy at the front hyped up the story and then when he opened the door… One room. With a temp wall that didn’t even reach the ceiling. And the walls were these gross colors and it was so lame an easy! I really think Escape Rooms need to be better and more immersive for guests. And if you don’t have the budget or creativity to do that, then maybe this business wasn’t for you.
Or use common game design solutions pioneered by video games and board games: 1) use colors that colorblind people can distinguish (e.g. red and blue not red and green), or 2) use both colors and symbols (so for example red is always also an ankh) so that colorblindness is irrelevant. The 2nd solution is both more achievable and more convenient for all players.
Colors and Symbols is the best. There are different types of colorblindness too, so although red/green is very common there's still some people who have trouble with red/blue.
@@danielhale1 other way to make it accesible for colorblindess is making the colors with really different values, son even in black and white they can be separated
That would be great! In fact, escape rooms that cater to specific handicaps would be fun [e.g.: dark rooms for blind people, for example]. There are dark restaurants staffed by blind people, so both can be put in neighbouring spaces in a mall or plaza, for theming purposes. I wonder if we could cater to people in wheelchairs, too. The idea is that the goal might be to get something at the top shelf, so how do we do it without getting out of our wheelchairs. What about staightjackets and handcuffs, too?
@@doctaco3462 It'd take a fuck ton of money so it'd never happen, but imagine if there was just a full recreation of the RCPD building that was an escape room. God that sounds like it'd be sick.
You can make an awesome escape room with a shed. The best escape room I've ever done was in 2 rickety sheds outside a straw maze in Idaho. It was freezing and it added to the ambiance. We only had 10 minutes and we had to work together between sheds. It wasn't elaborate, but the puzzles were good and they made the theme match the crap location
I've only been to one escape room a few years ago (Prohibition era, you and your group are alcohol suppliers, and you've got the hour in the room to figure out who ratted you out to the police, find out where your stash is and get out of there). It got me excited, but every other one I've seen advertised has been "you've been kidnapped by terrorists" or a ghost one, and it's unfortunate.
Here's one: obscure, non-intuitive puzzle does not equal hard puzzle. I was in one room where we were stuck on one step (another failure of linear rooms) where the correct step was to hug a teddy bear. ???
Like I get the teddy bear thing in theory, but being someone who would be hesitant to touch anything not essential to the puzzle out of fear of damaging something, I could see how someone would get stuck.
Austin: Don’t make puzzles too easy Also Austin: Don’t use math, color, chess, crosswords, books, or reading. Also also Austin: make sure to buy things from the appropriate time period, don’t use English and don’t use things that most people understand like combination locks.
Not to mention that if you were worried about them actually being an issue, there are such simple solutions. Don’t know chess? If there’s a chess board you can have an obvious chess rules book which would fit since this person would like chess. Worried about colour blind people being unable to solve it? Add a shape to the colour too. Someone may not know about literature? Have a book hidden somewhere or a note stating that maybe Romeos last name in the book was Zoebqmdkwja or smth so it’s more about remembering information given to you than something else
The first and only escape room experience I had was pretty uninspiring. It suffered from a little bit of all of these problems, but the main thing that seemed to hinder it was that you could skip parts of the room entirely. Like, you didn’t have to complete step one to start step four. So we were on step four before we even finished step two. Not unfun, just didn’t inspire me to want to go to more.
Although one idea is that you can solve a puzzle in multiple ways, or that there are multiple puzzles giving the same result. For example, an advanced puzzle could skip you forward faster, or do multiple easier ones.
@@Liggliluff The problem with that sort of design structure is that it often leaves a lot of loose ends. "What are the point of these things that we figured out if they don't do anything??"
I heard that for 4-digit combinations where each digit is a separate puzzle, some people just solve for the first two digits and then use brute-force to get the last 2
Note that if the star counting lock had been one big star, 4 medium stars, and 9 small stars, that would probably be fine. Counting is fine as long as it's smaller numbers.
If an adult can't count to a 100 (something we have children in Kidergarden practice, that's on the adult.) 1/10 Americans is functionally illiterate. We shouldn't be encouraging that by getting rid of words.
@@kyleellis1825 It's not about being able to count, it's about being able to keep track of what you have or haven't counted. If there were 57 stars scattered about on the walls and ceiling of a room, do you think you could accurately count all of them? Odds are you'd miss one or count one twice.
@@canolathra6865 Both rooms I went to gave us a note pad. So I'll concede that if you don't get a way to write down stuff, reduce the numbers from 100 to 10-20.
I’ve worked at a small business escape room for 2 years. We’ve consecutively won our county’s “best of” award since my boss opened in 2016, so I can confidently say we’re a kick ass escape room. YET we use master combination/generic locks. A: they’re easy to replace in a hurry, when we literally have 15 minutes to reset (and our rooms are BIG) before the next group needs to be greeted. And B: we literally can’t afford otherwise, same thing with laminated clues. Most of my work day is searching deep dark nooks and crannies to find essential keys, pieces and locks that 40% of the time have been pocketed by a guest. Or I’m hot gluing them, because they were broken by either one these ungodly, animalistic 13 year old boys people are breeding these days, or an intoxicated adult. You try finding a time machine themed lock that’s only $10 more than a $8 master lock pack. It’s unrealistic and the amount of keys/locks we have to replace is too much for crafted, one of a kind pieces. We’d go bankrupt.
The issue with having custom locks is that players frequently break them, so using inexpensive locks is usually the better option. My sister works in an escape room and answered a similar complaint i made. Biggest problems that these franchises have is with players breaking props. It's a big problem
Yeah and that ties right into modern locks being easily identifiable so you can know that’s what you need to do instead of trying to pry something open elsewhere not because you are an ape, but because you don’t know if it’s part of the game or not. The imagination is impressive and people will think all sorts of things are possibly part of the game so their attention has to be narrowed down for convenience and potential room damage. It’s just unfortunate that the thematic atmosphere of the room may suffer for it in setups without extreme well thought-out added creativity.
Then again using inexpensive locks may cheapen the experience for the guests expecting to be immersed in the world, therefore lowering the return rate.
@@accountid9681 having specific locks won't ruin the immersion compared to having good props, decorations, acting, and setting the scene. Another problem with having specially decorated locks, is that they are actually more likely to break because people are unfamiliar with them. It's just too expensive
I feel like an easy compromise is simply to paint the exterior of the standard locks in some way. They don't need to be neon green or blatantly brand new shiny straight from the store metallic.
@@Ventorath I mean, painting them a little won't hurt, as long as they are identifiable by the examples of locks presented by the game master at the beginning of the escape room game.
Worst and only escape room experience: We were thrown into a room with a five minute timer and the instructions were played over a low budget intercom by a guy speaking in an old western accent at the speed of an auctioneer. We failed.
The only escape room I’ve been in was an Egypt theme one. It was actually amazing and had no complaints. No spotty gamemasters, and everyone had something to do and several puzzles required multiple people. Giant walls moved, a laser puzzle, actual moveable stuff and the visuals were super impressive. Not sure if it’s a super popular one but it’s in KC.
I still remember the first escape room I went to. We had to climb out of an elevator through the top hatch. I honestly thought we'd get stuck there. Cause only a few of us were athletic and tall enough to just climb up. But we boosted a strong guy up and he pulled us all up.
Also after crawling through a vent, the room was so dark and there was a totally sus glass tube. Once we were all in, the light inside turned on and a zombie jumpscared us. Final part had us kill the zombie by reflecting light through glasses into a light detector thingy to turn on a machine to kill it. Neat af.
@@EmissaryofWind Yeah, the room had a warning that anyone physically incapable of climbing, crawling or strenuous activities couldn't enter. But it was the only room like that. The other difficulties were pretty normal but boring because of it.
They should level up by making "choose your own adventure" versions of escape rooms. Like when you solve the final clue of the room, two doors open up, each leading to different scenarios with different risks and you have to decide as a group which one to go to. Takes more space to do but also could be a great premium service.
I was toying with the idea of doing a competitive room. Two people or two teams of people would be solving different sets of puzzles from each other and periodically (depending on the puzzle solved) you would either get materials to help yourself/hinder the other team or a different side to the same story. This would allow for replayability of the same room by choosing which team/side you were on at the beginning. If you combined that with your choose your own adventure idea, you could essentially have one room with four endings to the story.
My worst escape room experience is a culmination of most of your points... The premise was that a board game inventor had gone mad and locked us in his trap-filled mansion. There were 7 of us, my wife and I started locked in a bathroom and the other 5 were locked in the parlor. We needed to pass clues back and forth under the door in order to open the lock between us. My wife and I had solved all of our clues and were just trapped waiting for the other 5 to solve theirs to get the second half of the combination... To make matters worse, once we got into the final room (the kitchen), there was a scrabble board on the kitchen table with tiles glued down to it. A note was next to the board which straight up read: "To get the final key, you'll need to unlock the fridge. The combination to that lock is the sum of points for the horizontal scrabble words plus the vertical scrabble words." We had to intuitively know where the double letter/word spaces were to calculate that into our counts. we lost count so many times. A good 25 of our 60 minutes was spent counting scrabble tiles. it was awful.
One time I went to an escape. The plot was simple, you stuck in pyramid, escape before it collapses in an hour. The escape room was divided into 3 rooms. The first one was dark and to open the door we needed to put on runes in an order, while playing with flashlights, keys and chests. The second room had 4 artifacts, 4 different puzzles with filling a tube with sand, controlling marble machinery, going back into the dark room with a different cipher and colours puzzles. It was incredibly fun as the final room was a tomb with a lazer puzzle and pointing them to eyes. It was really fun, even if it wasnt the best.
I've encountered a really bad puzzle where the clue was something about "look up" and the key was actually on top of a projector connected to the ceiling. I'm a short dude. They didn't provide a stair nor a stepping stool. How should I know that I can actually climb one of the tables eventhough they explicitly in the beginning told me the rules not to climb on stuffs cause it might break them.
In one escape room I did we failed because you get a clue you had to lay down on a bed to set off a sensor but, since they said don't climb on any furniture, we assumed it counted for the bed.
I love the escape room near me. I live in flanders and the theme of the escape room is 'flanders fields' you have to break into a machine gun nest accros a river, place explosive charges and blow it up. One of the rules was that, when you are at the other side of the river, you can only whisper to make sure you don't alert the Germans. It's based on a real mission that took place during the war and the room was recreated to look similar to what the situation looked like back then. Best room I've done so far
The one time I had a "low production value" escape room, they had a legitimate excuse (this was at a convention where they had very limited time to set up properly, and couldn't modify too much at the venue). The other one I went to was probably one of the original good ones.
I have never been to a real escape room. The only "escape room" I have ever done was in year 6 English class where the teacher said she was going out to check her phone and then locked all the doors and explained over the intercom in a creepy voice that we needed to solve a bunch of puzzles if we wanted to go home. I cried. great video btw.
I agree that the best approach is to tailor the story to the space and budget. Say you only have access to a very boring office space with white walls and fluorescent lighting. Then deck it out like an actual office--a water cooler, some cubicles, a computer, and a broken printer. Printing clues on laminated paper won't seem out of place, and writing clues on a whiteboard will be fine, too. But locks will seem out place. So less of an escape room and more of a mystery room.
my favorite ever escape room was in 7th grade, when our whole class was stressed bc of school, so instead of taking a test on "The Hound of the Baskervilles", we convinced our teacher to let us split up into groups and make our own escape rooms in the spare classroom next door. You needed a surface understanding of the book to finish the room, and it was a fun challenge to create a room that could be set up/ cleaned out in under 5 minutes. The added bonus was that we all got 100s on that project.
@@legendarygary2744 I thought the exact same 😂 I wish he would do a video about it. Especially if it were a BAD frustrating one and he'd get a unbeatable speed record.
I have worked at 2 escape rooms now and this stuff is definitely a problem. I will say the one I work at now has really high production value and actually pretty descent puzzles and sets, so they aren’t all bad 😄
I was once at a volcano-themed escape room. At one point we were working on a letter lock and all of a sudden the "volcano" made a loud roaring noise, and I was startled and dropped the lock...and it shattered into several pieces. The GM came in with a look of great exasperation and the whole game stopped while he put it back together. 😂
Back when the novelty was just getting started I went to this one called trapped in a room with a zombie. Not only was there the clues you had to find and specially built rooms, but after a few minutes a zombie would appear from a chest, and every so often their chain would grow in length. At some points later on the next piece of the puzzle would be in a place where the zombie could now touch you. People would try distracting the zombie so the other people could get those pieces. It was really cool.
Honestly, I feel like a survival horror themed room could work very well. Games like Resident Evil established the trope of logic puzzles that have no logical reason to be there years ago. You could lean into that to make something that could be pretty fun.
In a town near me there is a small escape room business. A couple years ago I went and did a small beginners one. It started off with decoding symbols and finding hidden keys but soon it turned into moving bookshelves and doing intricate puzzles that required lots of teamwork and creative thinking. I keep going back every half year or year to do new rooms. That experience inspired me to think more creatively and out of the box. It kickstarted my love for escape rooms.
I was in an two different escape rooms and both times the interior was broken- doors, which should pop open were stuck, tiny mechanics would pop out of their sockets, needing the help of a GM to get the next key out of the machinery... The worst puzzle was substracting two five-digit number to get a code just by calculating it in your head... it was unnecessary complicated to stretch the time. Bad GM story: we were on time (15 minutes before start) and the GM won't let us in, because "I'm not payed to let you in early". It was winter. And kinda cold. 2nd Escape Room had the same GM (or a sibling, because they looked strikingly similar) and both times I felt they really hate their job. They were just reading the rules in a monotone voice and opened the door. It's a bit like an MMO: it's only fun, because you have fun with friends, but as stand alone entertainment they're kinda boring.
Th only escape room I’ve ever been to was super mario themed. We had to save princess peach and go through different room that each had a different theme level. To go to the nest room we had to collect stars to open the doors and the after we solved the last puzzle the exit was a slide that looked like one of the green pipes in the game. Super fun, super immersive, 10/10 would recommend
Honestly the best escape rooms I've been to with solid, unique puzzles were ones with cheesy plots that Austin probably would not have liked, but the nature of the puzzles were such that while they were genuinely fantastic and what I want out of escape rooms, I can't imagine a plot that could possibly match them
We have done the "Haunted Room" in a few ways over the years. One was a fully written story, VERY loosely based on a local legend, that people can actually look up online. The haunt is in an old cabin, has an actual plot, with a short video at the beginning. The puzzles and props fit the actual story, and you aren't just "escaping", you are completing the story, and when you do, the ending video is like the ending of a movie. Another is a haunted old mansion, but again, tells the story of a wealthy old man that became a recluse when his wife died. And after he disappeared, the old place became the "haunted house" of the area, that supposedly held a treasure. When playing the game, you learn about the man and his wife, learn why the man vanished, and what his treasure actually is. You then help the ghostly couple and complete their story.
I completely agree about the set-dressing. So many rooms are "just the office". One secret, if you don't have a ton of money to turn an office into a private ship... choose a theme that fits what you have! We just completely re-modeled a a room originally was just an office, and turned it from a "beachside cottage" to a haunted mansion. Building the ENTIRE THING took less than $1000. Paint, some wood to make faux wainscoting, a free grandfather clock from Facebook Marketplace, some wall sconces from Hobby Lobby, old furniture from Goodwill and fake spiderwebs made from hot melt glue go a long way!
It wasn't an escape room, but one time I was doing a puzzle where one part of it had a sheet of music that we were supposed to play on a piano to figure out which song it was, and one girl in our group just starts singing the notes. Turns out she can tell what note it is just by looking at it, we didn't even need the piano, it was great.
I remember doing an escape room back in like 2016 and it was so low budget. Run by some people who looked like if we didn’t get out they were gonna sell us. There was one bit where we had to build a crossbow and shoot out a ‘security camera’. Great experience. There were genuinely iron bars on the window. Puzzles were well thought out and the rewards we reaped for getting to each new area was amazing
There were a few North American literal escape-room game-shows around the 2010's like _Estate of Panic_ or _Exit_ as well as some other game-shows inspired by videos games like _Cha$e._ They were cheesy but fun.
A while back, I went to an escape room in Fort Worth called The Hidden Chambers (specifically the Edgar Allen Poe Adventure) and it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. My group completed it with two minutes on the clock.
We did one where we were supposed to find our great aunt's treasure. They had one clue to a late puzzle just sitting out; with that, we skipped about half the room. According to the owner, "most people don't notice it." Sigh.
You can get away with something like that only if there's no obvious relationship between the solution and the puzzle until you reveal it later. But it's usually better to just hide the puzzle or the solution until the right time. The opposite is true, too. We had a door in one room that just didn't lock. About 50% of teams needed a hint to just open the door. Another 10% thought they were being clever by reaching through bars in the door and opening it from the other side. Eventually I just installed a lock and put a key in the room.
you've said a lot of "don't"s but i didnt hear too many "do"s. as someone who has never played an escape room i now only know what bad puzzles are and only got some vague explanations to what a good puzzle would be. i wanted an example to be honest. although i guess i could consider the vague ideas of what a good puzzle would be as a puzzle in and of itself
i disagree, he went into a lot of dos by ommisions of the dont this isnt a video about how properly to make an escape room, its about the negatives of the current escape room industry however i do find a lot of what he said to have some practical value in improving your escape rooms, such as using era appropriate locks, having a causal chain of events that makes sense given the scenario as well as part of the play-reward loop (something i legitmately covered in my game design degree) on how difficulty and emotion interact, too hard and its anxiety inducing and too easy and its boring
@@azzzertyy "such as using era appropriate locks" With how often shit breaks in escape rooms, I wouldn't be surprised if this is kinda unfeasible for some
@@elijaha773 Rudolph, Ohio. Check it out if you’re interested. The stop sign is by the post office. 👍🏻 Edit: Pedantically speaking there are four actual signs, as it’s a 4-way stop. I just meant at the time I lived there, about 15 years ago, it was the sole signed stoppage within the actuality of Rudolph.
I've done an IRL escape room exactly once and it was pretty rad, but my favorite implementation of the medium has been with VR games. Obviously they have their own limitations to deal with, but there's a lot more freedom in puzzle design in a virtual environment, and they can do things you couldn't get away with IRL, like killing the player.
When I stayed in an escape room there was no narrative. And that made the random jumble of puzzles quite engaging. These narratives sound quite ridiculous. The narrative at my escape room was “you’re trapped, can you get out?” And then there was weird stuff that later turned out to be a story. It was Cool.
i was in an escape room last week and i can say my experience over the years hasn't included most of these problems but i do live in a country/town that doesn't have many escape rooms so i can say you're right this might be a problem stemming for oversaturation
Sorry, I’m going to be THAT person and tell you that there is NO MATH in sudoku. It’s 9 numbers that cannot have repeated numbers in the same grid, the same row vertically and horizontally.
I hope he just used the wrong term. But still, you could add the numbers together and it should equal 45 on each row, column and square. But Sudoku doesn't need numbers anyway; it needs 9 unique symbols. It would be interesting to have 9 letters, and have it spell out the clue in text.
I did one escape room that was super creative, it was a generic prison setting, but it started off with the group split up into 2 cells, and having to work together to pass information/keys through the walls, after escaping it turned into this sort of sewer crawl where you have to find your way out of the prison before the "warden caught you". it was super fun
So I personally work at an escape room in Utah, and I think we are themed very well, have good flow, and our actors and game masters are amazing. But one thing that gets on my nerves is the fact that our building has no ceiling in the wear house. So while you are in the haunted room, you can also hear the screams from the nuclear power plant. Or you can hear the game masters and actors in their tiny cold room as they talk about stuff going on in the rooms. Otherwise it’s a very detailed and fun play.
![DDG & G Herbo - Nosey [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/I9Ra0Zc2NlQ/mqdefault.jpg)
I tried the Marion County Jail escape room. They just put me in a room with no keys and no puzzles and the dungeon master wouldn’t give up a single clue and didn’t release me for 6 years. 3/5
Would you poop there again?
Wait, the one by newton right? Loved it there!
Bruh, that one is the PRACTICE round, the door isn’t even locked, SMH.
oh my god, same!
i mean, two days?
sure.
but two years?
yeah, imma go to court for this lmao
Good for the money at least
One of the coolest escape rooms I've been to was run by a cat shelter as a fundraiser. It was a cat-related theme (so original that it's the only thing that comes up when you google it and I don't want to dox myself) but the shelter director wrote it herself and you could tell she was passionate about it. It was awesome to see her combining these two passions to make a fundraiser I'd actually want to go back to.
Is it still open? My fiancee works in a escape room and we love cats!
@@3laws292 It isn't sadly, they stopped doing it because of covid.
Is it “kingdom of cat” by any chance?
I feel like I know the person who ran this, sounds super familiar
@@alexandramcginnis8872 why are you trying to guess it if they said they didn’t want people to know it?
"WE NEED A HINT"
Message seen, left on read.
Hahahahahahahaha
@@crabser2253 what can I say, laughter is a universal language.
@@razzledazzle8953 apparently google disagrees
@@crabser2253 i unironically get that for any random string of text. google is drunk.
@@Fattts i also keep getting them on random text strings. I don't even know what RUclips is doing anymore.
The best escape room I can remember was one taking place in an abandoned submarine at the bottom of the ocean with important papers about a russian invasion. And there was some sort of gas leak that needed to be fixed before continuing the investigation; so at the start of the adventure, the whole team needed to wear a gasmask that was super limiting in terms of vision. It was pitch dark and we needed flashlights to navigate the room. It was just so great thematically and put us right into the mood of the game.
But the great thing is: all the puzzles were contextualised by the submarine. It was all about opening sectors, decompression, restarting the engines etc. to let us access other parts of the main room.
WOW. I love this idea.
OMG That was awesome!
Damn, that’s incredible!
That sounds cool.
Where was it?
I feel like Escape Rooms seem to be artificially limiting themselves to the "Escape a Room" premise, probably because it's the most economical (small sets, no actors), but I think there's tons of potential for a premium experience leaning more into general interactive theater.
SuperBunnyHop has a great video where he describes going to a limited time only "Metal Gear Solid" escape room which was basically a stealth game in real life. Crawl around, avoid guards who were actors in the environment, and even hide in lockers with the exact same slot peep holes as in the games. Him describing that experience might be the most jealous I've ever been of anyone in my life.
i really want to try this metal gear solid escape room now
I mean, I live on an island thats underdeveloped and even we have escape rooms with guards acting as zombies and time limits.. like is that not the standard?
That escape room reminds me of the old game, "Hacker II", where you would use robots to break into a facility to unlock a safe. You would have access to the security cameras and be able to record and play back to fool anybody watching the physical screen. This sounds better than a computer game can be, but that is the point: the game was immersive even though it was run on old technology.
That room that you describe sounds exciting. It would be more exciting if you could combine it laser tag, where the guards had incentive to shoot.
That sounds super fun
@@thechugg4372 "I may live on an underdeveloped island, but at least we have good escape rooms"
"Your set dressing should be immersive"
I went to an escape room that was office-themed, and at the time it didn't occur to me that the theme could've been chosen to be more economical; I simply thought that they did a good job at making it feel like an office.
Another economical one was that we were musicians but we were locked out from getting on stage, so we were stuck backstage.
those are great ideas for using your space to your advantage XD
That backstage idea sounds clever.
That's such a fun and unique room premise! There's a lot of potential in that one :D
The backstage one sounds interesting. How did they achieve the "puzzle" elements?
I feel like there's so much possibility with office themed rooms since nostalgia can be a big aesthetic appeal - like using voicemails, 80s office decor, old computers, etc etc would be soooo cool. And the materials to dress the set can be found in every thrift store.
We had a group of 4 one time and we were doing great. This was the “most challenging” room at the establishment according to them. Anyway, we were doing great. Like 15 minutes in and only two steps away from the exit. We got stuck on this pyramid puzzle and we asked for a hint and they gave us a hint, and then another, and another. We spent about 40 minutes on this one puzzle and we eventually failed the room because we couldn’t get past it. At the end when the GM came into the room, they said “oh you’re missing a piece” and the piece was OUTSIDE the room. They forgot to reset it correctly. Terrible experience, but we got our money back.
I would say that, in addition to being a mistake, was also a Bad Game Master. If one of my players struggled on something for that long I would have paused the time and stepped in to make sure something wasn't wrong. It happens so often that players pocket keys, stuff gets reset wrong or not at all, and sometimes thing just plain don't work when they should that I would assume you aren't the problem and the game is.
@@TheTruthx58 The exact same thing happened to me in an escape room, except no refund. just a whoops sorry, have an extra 10 minutes in the room, even though we forgot to reset a clue that stalled you guys for 25 minutes.... and it was the very first clue too XD
I had a similar experience where I found a string tucked behind a drawer and when we got out the GM was like "omg we've been looking for that every where, we just thought someone stole it." and they were just gonna let people keep playing the room without a crucial part of the puzzle?!
At least you got refunded, shows that at the minimum they were aware of how bad they screwed up
@@kaitlynchiostri1605 Yes, and if you found it while playing and managed to finish the room then it wasnt as important, you cannot stall another's person's game looking for something that isn't vital to the room that could've perfectly been stolen
So I've actually worked as a game master last year, and I generally agree with you. The only thing I'm a bit opposed to is the "No puzzles on laminated paper"-pet peeve. Because yeah, it feels a bit weird to find things like that in a jungle-setting. Then again, do keep in mind that about 30% of people act like actual gorillas when they're inside the room. So the things have to be durable. Also, the game masters have to desinfect the interior of the room and reset it in about 15 minutes each time. Non-laminated scrolls and postcards will be fucking destroyed in about half a day.
there are other ways to write things down durably. You could use a clay slab, for a ancient Egyptian room, or engrave symbols in clear ceramic tiles. These would be more expensive for the escape room, but they are one time purchases, which enhance the experience, and if I'm paying 50$ per person I expect nothing less. It is a premium experience.
@@accountid9681 the clay stuff is great in theory, but I’ve also worked as a game master and having stuff that “fits the theme more” often leads to more replacements. We’ve done clay chess pieces or resin candy and all have ended up broken. All it take is one butter fingers and something that has the possibility of shattering absolutely will break. If you go the plastic route it feels just as ingenuine as the laminated sheets. We’ve even printed things on canvas and had groups smudge the ink with sanitiser or write on them with whiteboard markers. Sometimes something that’s easy to replace is often the best option, at least for my non-franchise workplace. (Not that we didn’t have replacements for the above but you do get through them)
@@isabelconti4950 Damn, I knew it was bad, but not that bad.
@@accountid9681 everything we gamemasters joke about has happened. I kid you not, we put a couch in the first room of a cabin-themed room and someone ransacked another players purse, found a pocket knife, and tore open the couch…. What?!
@@isabelconti4950 As a DM for D&D who dabbles in making terrain where people know I'm watching them, they still sometimes do stupid shit with it. I think that lamination is lame, but the only way to avoid this issue would be to require a deposit it feels like.
My favorite experience with an escape room was one in which our group of 10 was split into 2 groups. The 5 who were more "Right Brain" and the 5 who were more "Left Brain". The groups were in two separate (but combined through holes in the wall) rooms. Each room had similar puzzles that we needed to work together to solve (which was hard with only vocal communication).
The set design was amazing too. Right brain room had bright colors and random patterns, bean bag chairs, and such, the left brain was all black and white, fancy chairs, math related things. When we had the chance to see each other's room both groups just ran around exploring because we had so much fun finally seeing what the others were talking about.
It was amazing.
But there is no such thing as left brained or right brained
And what if someone likes both?
@@tetrofita1787 It was up to the group to decide who goes into which group. We had people who were a mix of the two, and we just balanced it out evenly.
wow! where was this?
@@leewinters3939 "Just Escape" in La Grange, IL!
I had a similar split the group experience. Spy themed, where we have to stop a mad scientist’s dirty bomb. each team had a walky talky to chat with the other team, and lab notes etc in one room often became inputs to the other room’s puzzles. Some puzzles even undid locks in the other room, mostly to keep the groups progressing at the same pace I assume. The room culminated with one large room the group met back up in. VERY on theme, and the puzzles were fantastic.
The split was roughly described as physical puzzles vs mental puzzles, so we just all picked whether we’d have more fun as a tinker or a thinker.
One time I was doing a 30 minute escape room, and my friend and I got stuck on one puzzle at around 19 minutes. We went over it several times, repeating the rules to ourselves, looking at it from different angles, etc. We finally had to ask for a clue, and the clue indicated that we needed to do exactly what we had been doing. Eventually, the time ran out and we lost. On our way out, I asked the GM was the solution was, and it turns out we had solved it on our third try, but electrical problems caused it to malfunction. Even worse, she confirmed that it was the final puzzle of the game, and based on when we had attempted that solution, we could’ve placed on a leaderboard.
We still technically won the room, I guess, but it was really broke the immersion and left us feeling cheated.
But if they have video proof, they could verify and still count it though.
Oof. I had a similar problem with an escape room I went to - it had one of those puzzles where you need to get a specific volume of water and you've only got containers of other volumes. We got the right solution, (as a staff member confirmed) but the computer didn't recognise it for some reason. By the looks of it it had some kind of flow measuring equipment to determine if you got it right, no idea why they used that instead of just using measuring the weight.
I worked for a company that solved that issue by allowing gamemasters to manually trigger all electronic components in the case of a malfunction.
@@phelpysan Possibly to keep you from just putting a certain weight of anything on the scale to bypass the puzzle? I dunno how it was set up, just a guess as to why they didn't.
@@Skinflaps_Meatslapper No, the equipment was enclosed to prevent that sort of thing
I've owned and ran an escape room for about five years now and have seen a few other ones pop up in my town and disappear since we opened. One only used pre-fab kits you can order and we heard a lot of complaints about how their hints made no sense or didn't relate to where they were stuck. Prime example of buying a set of puzzles the manager didn't actually understand. One that lasted a bit longer had some really cool rooms, some of them purchased but they went the extra mile to really dress up their rooms. They only lasted about a year and a half because they were hemorrhaging money the entire time they were open. I like to believe we stayed open for two main reason, we made all of our own stuff, props, puzzles, decor, everything was made in house by us so our rooms were truly unique. Second we ran it like a business rather then a hobby. Yeah motorized doors, actors, ceiling to floor decorations are all cool but we are in a town of only 60k people so we know we can't afford to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a room. Our average budget is about 1-2k for a room. We prowl garage sales and thrift stores all the time and repurpose everything we don't build from scratch to be smart with our money. I'll admit sometimes the rooms may look a bit 'cheap' but hey of the five escape rooms that have come through the place we were the first and we're the only one still open.
As a side note the hardest part of puzzle design is something painfully obvious to one group doesn't make a lick of sense to another. We have rooms where the success rate is below 25% but will occasionally get a group that finishes then in twenty minutes. Likewise we'll have rooms with a success rate over 95% and you'll get a group that barely makes it halfway. Putting difficulty ratings on the rooms helps gear them towards veterans and newbies but it is crazy hard to come up with a puzzle that is doable for most without being impossible to some and painfully obvious to some others.
I'm in school for computer science and have a hobby of playing with electronics. I really want to open an escape room because I feel like I can have high tech electronics for super cheap and make an awesome experience.
I feel like you definitely found the way to manage the balancing act of running this sort of business! I live in a similarly sized town and have seen several pop up and disappear pretty quickly and they all suffered from the things you described. One room was kinda obvious they'd blown the budget buying several pieces of new furniture and then the rest of the room was very poorly thrown together with very tacky items.
Not sure how feasible it is for you but I actually cranked up the difficulty when I heard my players saying they were bored. They got a longer word puzzle with a less common word. Or some extra pieces to sort through. Especially easy with digital stuff or if there's easy access to rooms the players haven't gotten to yet. Or vice versa, easy word or some excuse for extra minutes like the getaway driver calls like "Are you done? The cops are closing in...Fine, I'll buy you a few extra minutes *tires squeal*". To me the main thing is keeping it that medium challenge level so they stay engaged and have a good experience.
I feel bad for those who BUY bad puzzles... 🤷♀️ Like... Didn't you play it first?
See, ive actually gone to an escape room place that actually was an entire VR escape room. You walked around with a big laptop on your back and tried to fix this space station it was pretty unique
That sounds cool! Where was it?
@@austinmcconnell down in florida somewhere I forgot the exact location though- it was pretty cool but me and my friend failed horribly to an asteroid
@@somerandomkid1237 Used to be one in Florida at Disney Springs called "The Void". Unfortunately, it didn't survive the past year. :|
I did one of those, too. Didn't really enjoy it tho, but maybe that's just me. Escape rooms have - IMO - a lot to do with holding stuff in your hands and examining it closely, or fiddling with mechanical devices, trying every possible way some two things could fit together. In VR you lose a lot of those elements, just by nature of the technological restrictions. I could just as well play a puzzle game at home without paying 60 bucks per person for an hour...
On the other hand, the same place also has a 3v3 PVP VR shooter, that one is absolutely amazing!
Oh hey, I have kinda the same thing here, though it's not space but instead an assassin creed's thingy where you escape a pyramid. Never tried it, but it looks cool
I’m from France. Strangely I don’t have the same feeling here. The level of quality in our escapes are getting higher and higher. The market is so competitive that only extra qualitative escapes are succeeding (last one in date was yesterday “the nautilus” by unleash escape, they called it a “narrative experience”, “not really an escape room”.
yes in France the themes are very varied and the challenges are related to the theme (in my experience in and around Paris and Brittany)
To be fair, you're comparing the idea of Escape Rooms within France. Try comparing those same rooms and ideas to other countries in Europe. Now try making all of those unique and equally engaging. Now do that for 50 countries. Then, and only then, can you truly try to compare as though you're on par with the USA's problem with "this state is good and this state isn't".
"Not everyone knows the rules to chess."
Now here's an interesting idea for a medieval setting. Use rules to chess that very few or NO people understand, and make figuring out the rules from clues in the room important.
@Oskar winters have two different difficulty rooms. Each clearly marked with skill level like, understands chess, and, doesn't understand chess.
@Oskar winters maybe even seasoned chess players would be surprised to learn that the clues lead to...en passant
@@revimfadli4666 I don't think that somebody who plays chess would not have heard of en passant... Even i know what it is and i am not a chess player at all.
@@revimfadli4666 Holy hell
There are no extremely obscure rules to chess.
Probably my worst experience in an escape room is an issue that you didn’t even cover. I was playing an outer space themed escape room with my family. The four of us were paired with a this couple that had clearly done the escape room before and were just trying to get a new personal high score. We could barely do anything because we had no idea what was going on.
They should never put two groups together. We were stuck with this woman, her mother, and her son. She literally destroyed the entire room, ripped pictures off of walls even though they told us not to, and basically mixed everything up by grabbing all of the items and setting them on the table making it impossible to solve the puzzles. It was infuriating. We failed. That was the last time I’ve done an escape room.
I'm guessing these companies are doing cash grabs, getting as many people into each room as possible, even if it means combining groups. When I've done them, it's always been my group, no one else in the room with us. If you can't book a room for your party and no one else, don't do it imo.
I’ve never had to do one with strangers and I’ve done several. I’ve had positive experiences with the rooms too.
@@christophercrawford2736 I guess 1) you've been lucky, and 2) you're only backing up what the other person said about ensuring you don't go somewhere that puts you with another group.
Tbh I appreciate the insights that most places are good but you should still check
@@SuperNuclearUnicorn could also be because a vast majority of the ones I’ve done have been after COVID-19 appeared
It never occurred to me that escape rooms are one-shot role playing sessions. Wow, mind blown.
I think the next level for these kinds of rooms is to complicate the game, make it more like a RPG. Have interactive consequences. Imagine if you are playing as prisoners aboard an alien spaceship, and through a window in a nearby room you can see an alien trying to keep you in the room, while you work to escape it. That might be a little more fun for the GMs, as they'd have a couple things to try, varying the game each time.
its like being tricked into larping then, ideally, realizing the fun of a roleplaying session. i cannot vouch, however, for larping, i haven’t done it or done any research on it :)
What frustrates me is the lack of escape rooms that allow one player. I don't mind if I have to pay double or more to play alone, but I want the challenge sometimes. In SoCal it was so hard to find an escape room that allowed a single player. Thanks to Reddit I found Mob Accountant, which was great as a single player! The only two flaws were that I used a hint for a lock combination I got right, I just didn't know how to open the lock (I think I should have gotten that free since I solved the puzzle), and the game is about not just escaping, but collecting as much money as possible before leaving, only there's no way to gauge how close you are to escaping. If I had known I was about to be done, I would have looked for more money before finishing, since I had time left. Still, it was well worth it. Single player games are so fun.
you know what they say: no roleplay is better than bad roleplay
Haha, fancy seeing you here.
Well, i've been struggling for 23 years to escape my parents house. They do make a very good escape room, what's with the not having to pay rent and all that
Yeah, me too, and the only hint i got was smth along the lines of "you are a dissapointment". Maybe it's some sort of encrypted message?
Do you need help solving the puzzle? I can... move in and help?
Sounds like you have an awesome gamemaster!
My mum made me start paying "board" as soon as I got my first part time job whilst still at school!! At the time she wanted 1/3rd of my $24 per week, in the 80's, which I then thought sucked but now it's more like 3/4's which really sucks!!
I think my favorite escape room experience was the time my group accidentally solved several puzzles WAY out of order because the GM underestimated us. The game had us playing as super spies trying to reconstruct how a mysterious occultist had gone missing, and the room was set up as the missing guy's study, including a full bookcase. Because half of us were drunk and half were sober (one person had skipped the pub crawl, another was pregnant, and I don't really drink), we divided up labor accordingly, giving Team Sober the most fiddly, detail-oriented tasks and assigning Team Drunk to gently ransack the place for clues. While my friends spread out, looking at the art on the walls or the papers on the desk, I went right to the books and singled out the ones least likely to have been bought by the foot or by the pound, noting which were actual old books with real titles and which were likely to be made up for the game. (I spent a lot of weekends in used bookstores as a kid, used to volunteer in a library, and am low-key obsessed with the minutiae of book repair, etc.) I ended up pulling out the most likely plant, flipping through it, and finding a clue that clearly connected to something we hadn't found yet. I presented the clue immediately because it had seemed easy to me, and easy puzzles come first, right?
Apparently the bookcase puzzle was supposed to happen later and take a lot longer, especially with a group that was half drunk. And that was before the "mysterious incantation" on a wall turned out to be plain old Latin. (Team Sober included a classics nerd, who had to be restrained from correcting the grammar.)
Apparently we'd been given a room that was thought to be challenging for a bachelorette party (which we were), and six women (three drunk) swanning in with feather boas and silly hats didn't seem all that well-equipped. We didn't mention when booking that the group included a librarian, a researcher, and multiple teachers, along with people who had picked up lots of weird knowledge or skills for various reasons. Ironically, solving the initial puzzles out of order made the final "magic ritual" harder because, not having a strong sense of which puzzles were supposed to be easy and which more difficult, we kept getting the steps out of sequence.
I have a lot of sympathy for game designers now. In hindsight, a half-drunk crew of fairly esoteric nerds in boas and plastic crowns is no one's ideal audience.
I was just glad there wasn't a wasn't a chess puzzle. None of us knew how to play chess.
Thankfully not all chess puzzles actually require you to know how to play chess, Eg a scenario I'm going at the moment, long term build as huge learning curve, has a chess board in it but it's connected to another puzzle which just gives you the hint on where to move the piece to next, to open an 8 character wooden combination lock box.
The best escape room experience I had was in a room themed after a garage sale. We had to puzzle out the most valuable piece in the room (a task that involved getting combos for all the safes, so we could see what was inside them as well as finding all the secret compartments in furniture).
ooh... that sounds really cool! Where was it?
@@austinmcconnell Fuzzy Logic in Downers Grove, Illinois.
I went to middle school with the boyfriend of one of the co-owners, so when they were testing their rooms for opening, myself and a group of friends got to try them out. The garage sale worked perfectly. The casino-themed room (find the golden chip) needed some tweaks. But that was years ago, so I bet the room's well-tuned now.
@@darkerSolstice oooh that's not too far from me, I'll have to check that one out!!
I had an escape room that needed us to solve an extremely hard Sudoku puzzle to get a number for a code. And, it was a room without lights and they only gave us one tiny flashlight. Which means while the person is solving the puzzle others can’t really search for other clues.
Oof. I feel like that probably didn't get play-tested.
I really disliked the one room I did because it was too small physically for the group I was in and didn't have enough puzzles, but more importantly;
The room was really dark and had two"torches" (it was magic/sorcery themed) and we had to be in the dark for like, the first 3 puzzles. It made the small room even smaller.
@@austinmcconnell by the way, you mention Sudoku in the video. Sudoku doesn't involve math as you mentioned. I suggest mentioning a correction in the description and in a pinned comment.
@@eugenetswong Uhh, isn't adding numbers "math"?
@@unliving_ball_of_gas yes, it is, and I think that there are techniques that might use math, but normally, Sudoku doesn't involve any adding. When creating these puzzles, you can replace the numbers with letters, words, pictures, or symbols, and then the player should still be fairly comfortable solving it in the same way.
I have always wanted to do a purely physical escape room, no puzzles, only physically altering things in a room, like having to craft a lockpicking set out of light bulbs. I think that would be soooo fun.
You definitely should ive been to one where I had to travel back on forth in this trolly on like a very narrow pathway and god I had so much fun, and this one simple but I had to match smells to a scent to figure out the puzzle
@@lovemeh7899 that does sound fun
I'm working on things like that but is may take years for my minimal budget.
Hey, I ran thousands of escape rooms at the largest venue in the United States for years. Some thoughts:
1) you have to keep in mind that parts need to be easily replaceable. This is why you get the high school lock on the ancient Egyptian puzzle. I wish every group was like you and was totally into the concept; unfortunately about 70% of groups at my venue were intoxicated after a certain time of night and would damage objects in the room constantly.
2) the name “escape room” should really be changed to “puzzle room.” The former implies the goal of the entire event is to get out by whatever means necessary. Including forcing things open.
Agreed heavily, it’s literally what they are, and I kinda assumed with this day and age theres people who go to escape rooms for fun and theres no issue with that (although it brings really cheap escape rooms and scammish ones) Ive been to a lot of escape rooms and always get the run down of not to grab anything to hastily, and be careful with the objects its tiring but it makes sense on why they are there to begin with.
Correction: her boss was having her game master 5 games at once. That sounds like hell.
yeah i dont like how hes calling her an awful game master when its clearly a management issue and she was probably trying her best under the circumstances
Honestly my first thought when he said that was 'Oh god, their coworker(s) probably called off last minute and no one else could come, but the boss just told her to figure it out"
As a game master I do agree, it's not her fault if she has to handle 5 games at a time. It already feels awful when I have to handle 2 qhen someone is sick.
Please everyone be considerate of your GM.
Yes, there's definitely a difference between "this isn't being game mastered well" and "they're a bad game master". That woman was probably having a terrible time.
As someone who has been gamemastering for over 3 years now. I've had that experience... Running 5 rooms at once, answering the phone, running the front desk, resetting rooms, giving the intro to other rooms all well running the other games and only getting about 10 seconds to look at the monitor and where they are at... If they did ask for a clue, I would give a clue that seems relvant if they responded with "We did that one already." I would say "Sorry ". I would explain what's going on to the groups after and a lot of them would feel empathic for me. It's not easy and to hear that is quite demeaning...
As a game master at an escape room, after watching this video, I realize I'm pretty spoiled working at a place that doesn't have any of these issues with the games. Like, as an employee I can actually vouch for our games, like, they're actually good.
Same here!
Where
...where?
Where!?
WHERE?
As for worst game mastering experience at the last escape room I worked at there was one time I had to convince a very angry family that they didn’t want to do our escape room because the building next to us was in fact on fire and our room was filling with smoke. I’ve also had a guy bring a knife to the room so he could pick locks and he ended up cutting himself. Please don’t be these people. game mastering is fun but also really really hard. So if you enjoyed your experience please consider tipping us since our hours are bad and we don’t get payed much 😅
I don't understand people who try to pick locks during games. They're paying for a gaming experience... what is the point of skipping through all the elements of the game just to reach the end sooner? They're robbing themselves.
@@austinmcconnell The same people that read the ending of a book when there's too much tension about what's going to happen next
@@austinmcconnell the same kind of people who cheat on video games.
@@austinmcconnell apparently he had never done an escape room before so he thought he had to do whatever was in his power to escape. He didn’t know there were puzzles😂
That first bad experience sounds really frustrating, but trying to run 5 games at once would be impossible. That's not necessarily a bad gamesmaster (although they might be), that's bad hiring policies.
Yup. We don't let our game masters run more than three rooms at once. If there's only one GM working and three rooms are booked for a given time slot, we actually close the fourth room for that slot. On weeknights there are plenty of empty slots so we're not losing much business, and it makes for a better experience all around.
On weekends we schedule enough staff to run all the rooms at once.
@@itzac Lol at our place there is one game master per room at all times, and now that ive experienced such premium treatment i do gotta admit it sucks having being asked "yo where you at in the room?"
@@MultiPaco06 we watch closely enough that we only have to ask if a particular puzzle is out of view of the cameras. And there are only a few instances of that. I'm more concerned about players having to wait for a response.
@@itzac One person shouldn't be running more than one game. That's just a way to get out of paying three people to provide a personal experience for each rooms players. Plus, now one person is dealing with three groups of people showing up at random times, checking in three sets of people, going over rules, bringing each group in to their room. That's going to overwork the GM, and diminish the player's experiences more often. Our place has GMs on-call, so if a room books, they get called in (with a two hour lead), and if need be, the owners will come in and run a game.
@@Grand_Works our 4.9 Google rating would seem to indicate that our players are very happy with their experiences. We are also able to accommodate walk-ins and back-to-back games this way, and we can provide our employees with a reliable schedule. We also start our games at longer intervals when we only have one GM, specifically to make signing in and launching less chaotic.
I had a game master get upset with my group for solving the puzzles the “wrong way” once. He passive aggressively had us reset the puzzle, which had way too few permutations to not accidentally solve. Bad puzzle and bad gamemaster
that was stupid. there was one time my friends did an escape room and one of my friends solve it completely different from the puzzle and the the gamemaster was so confuse, but thought it was funny.
When I did one of the cheap one room ones at a mall, when we got out they checked to make sure we opened every lock and didn't figure something out ahead of when we technically were suppose to. (I.e try a code on a poster to a lock and open it before we opened the chest that gave us the clue to point to the poster)
@@stevennguyen8935 Hey, if you figure out a way to solve a puzzle that isn't technically how you solve the puzzle, you've still solved the puzzle and it counts. As a game master, as long as you don't break anything, it counts!
I remember during a highschool trip we went to this escape room place where there had to be at least 4 students per room. My favorite one was a room where me and my friends were stuck, the walls were white and engraved with inspirational messages. An intercom played ambient music and a voice saying things like “you are the key,” and “this room can only be solved by you.” Eventually we found out every single “you” in the wall was a shallow button, and we all had to push one at the same time to open it.
I went to this place too
Where?
That's pretty cool, ngl.
See, what works about that in that it's really smart comedy. inspirational posters can be maddeningly impersonal feeling. And they tend to be very individualistic, whereas this puzzle is solved by the collective --all of "you" in the group. Someone thought a thing here. I would LOVE to know what inspired that.
that's sick, where was it?
As someone who’s built a few rooms for my college, I completely agree with this video. Aligning theme and location and props and tech and team size and hint systems and administration was incredibly difficult. That said, they asked me to do it again so I guess they liked it 😊
I had an idea for an escape room called "escape from margaritaville" where its all tiki bar themed, and you have an hour to escape or you're trapped forever in a room playing Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville" on loop. The final key you need to escape would be in the "lost shaker of salts".
I want to play this so bad lmao
A free drink ticket at the end please
I’ve seen this advertised somewhere…
What makes it hard to complete in time is the unlimited margarita slush machine in the room with you.
- Wait - the salt shaker is inside and you have to drink the machine empty to find it.
It also could have you playing a lot of games like pool or darts. The dart board could have a button or some wire activared by the metal tip or the dart and you have to stick it in a hole in the dart board. Pool could also have the billards hiding something in them.
Escape rooms could learn a thing from classic Adventure Game puzzle design. It's effectively the same sort of scenario (although limited by what's realistically possible, of course), the major difference being that Adventure Games use puzzles to give the players the experience of going on an adventure, whereas Escape Rooms use adventures to give the players the experience of solving a puzzle.
Like, I can buy a Sudoku book for $5 no problem. I don't pay $100 to get locked in a room and solve 10 of them, I pay $100 to experience a setting, tone, and adventure.
Maybe you need a mustache for a disguise so you spook a cat and make it run into some tape?
The devs of Myst could potentially make the greatest escape room of all time.
Hey! I would love to throw in some input as someone who has worked at an escape room and currently working at another one. Some of the ideas you have are great in theory, but would ultimately fail in practice. Laminated papers are a must. It lets them last longer and protects them from more rough groups. There really isn’t a way to make word locks in more theme to the room unless they’re custom made. And at the place I work at now we have three back ups to every lock so it would just be too much money. We do our best to make sure everything is in theme, but it all comes down to money in the end. Again, I think you make great points. I can see from an outsiders perspective how these might seem simple, but as an employee they aren’t as practical as one might think. If you have any questions about the workings of an escape room please send them my way! I would love to answer!
Yes, so true! People who haven’t worked in an escape room may not realise how often things get broken 😅 Everything needs to be durable & easily/economically replaced!
Totally understand your points but what's the furthest course of action you can take from the people damaging the room's props/puzzles/decor whether intentionally or accidentally? Surely the waiver should account for some compensation in loss? And does business insurance do anything for this niche industry?
I think this is kind of the point the video is making though - the rooms are designed to be convenient and cheap rather than immersive experiences designed for a specific story. For example, if the setting doesn’t have period appropriate word combination locks, then maybe there shouldn’t be a puzzle based on them in that room. I don’t think anyone is saying it is easy to create a really great experience, just that the first escape rooms were made by really dedicated designers who took these things into account and that the quality has suffered as it’s become more commercialized and business conveniences were prioritized instead.
Can you not have 3D printed decorative cases for the locks? So when the mechanism gets trashed you can swap a new lock into the case. The case may in fact protect the locks a little, saving on replacement costs.
@@im.jintan it’s not just large destruction in rooms, that rarely happens. It’s usually a few groups being rough with a piece of paper and it begins to crumble, or worse, someone writing on it(which means we need a completely new one for the next room). Same for props, there’s always a few rough groups who do damage over time, never one group who goes in and completely trashes the room.
went to a murder mystery type room where it was about a magician and we were “backstage” it was so cool looked like we were actually backstage didn’t solve it cause i went with my friend and our IQs drop like 50 points when we’re together
excited to go back to another location with more of my friends :)
A neat spin on the escape room game master dynamic could be if the game master was actually in the room playing a character. Like, perhaps they're an annoying but useful prisoner and you're trying to free them from a jail cell or something. Would make sense for someone like that to know the room pretty well, since they've been locked up there for a while, but also not to readily volunteer that information, because they're annoying. As such, the whole "three hints" system would make sense as a part the experience as opposed to just obviously being an immersion-breaking game mechanic.
i think i saw they had something like this in a conan obrian segment where he did an escape room. the room was 50’s themed? it had a secretary to fit with the plot of the game.
Woah, that is an *amazing* idea!
We had that in the one I went to, they didn’t act like they had meta knowledge, just that they were good at finding things/working on puzzles, no true “hints”, but we could ask them for assistance or if we were fighting/super stuck, they were able to intervene.
There’s one in Kansas City like that called the basement where there is literally a prisoner in there that you have to help
Yeah, one I went to had a game master like that. Can confirm, she was great at staying in character and very helpful at guiding us through puzzles we were stuck on (or keeping us from making dumb mistakes that would break things).
One time, my boyfriend and I went out for a date night to his first escape room. We did a lot of it together, and it was actually a pretty decent one, but there was one clue that was just so confusing. They had some kind of riddle on the shower wall, and we essentially agreed that the answer to the riddle was "silence" but couldn't figure out what to do with that. We tried to not talk, nothing. Eventually, we asked for a hint and the game master told us that there was a lock with a five-letter combination. Somehow, we were supposed to deduce that "silence", the answer to the riddle, had a synonym- QUIET- that could be put into the lock. But quiet wasn't the answer to the riddle. Silence was. A piece of the riddle was that you can "break" it. Like, breaking silence. But you CANNOT break "quiet". I was infuriated.
Hate to disagree, but "the quiet was broken by...." is a common enough phrase. I don't doubt your claim that maybe the riddle didn't work for quiet in some other way, and its annoying to have a riddle with multiple synonymous answers, but you can break the quiet.
@@aidanbailey9967 that is not a common phrase
Aidan Bailey that’s not a common phrase at all and I don’t even think it’s proper English
@@aidanbailey9967 , this reply actually hurt my brain to read. You are totally wrong and anyone you have ever heard say that phrase is an idiot (as is the person that was in charge of Chloe Ostiguy's game that said 'silence' and 'quiet' are synonyms). 'Silent' and 'quiet' are synonyms, but 'silence' is not, because 'silence' is a noun (which is why it can be "broken"). 'Silent' and 'quiet', on the other hand, are adjectives and can *NOT* be "broken". I cannot overstate how wrong it is to try and say one can "break the quiet". Chloe Ostiguy is totally justified in her fury against the morons that came up with that puzzle.
@@aidanbailey9967 google the respective phrases
700k results for "quiet was broken" but the first one is literally on a page for silence was broken
9 million results for "silence was broken"
If the answer to your riddle could be two words, and the wrong answer is 13x more common than the right one.... you made a bad riddle
There was one puzzle that was absolutely amazing- it was zombie themed, and there was an actual man who stood in a closet and randomly burst out to scare the living daylights out of you. I have zero regrets for grabbing my coworker's hoodie and shoving them in front of me to get eaten first. Sorry Mike.
One time I went to an escape room with a friend and we found a combo lock that we couldn't find the answer for. He tried his locker code for no reason because we were just having fun and he opened the lock with it. After we escaped the supervisor said we skipped 2 or 3 puzzles with that lucky coincide. We laughed about it for hours.
I feel like “I’ve Had Bad Experiences With Escape Rooms And I Want To Complain About Them” is a more accurate title for this video
The build to your budget is so incredibly true. We've seen indie films become fantastic by knowing what they have to work with and leaning into strengths. I've gone to two both in my town of Duluth, MN and they were themed perfectly as it was after the college and the harbor.
Uffda
Oh fuck, we got some of those? I guess makes sense though, duluth is more touristy oriented. Their ain't much up here, so I guess I didn't expect much in the first place
@@Narflex Hell they're everywhere even in the Duluth down in Georgia
One time, my group skipped half of the escape room because one of our members randomly punched a code into a six-button keypad and it ended up causing us to get the room record. Otherwise, we were definitely not escaping.
gg I guess
I've done some escape rooms with my family and on two occasions we've managed to skip large chunks of the puzzle.
On one, the final lock was a directional lock that clearly couldn't have that many combinations. Since the room was so linear it made sense for one person to just stand bruteforcing the final lock since they had nothing else to do and we got it open in a few minutes. After that we went back and did all the puzzles you were meant to do first.
On another, we got a code for a lock, but didn't know which it was so we just put it into all of them. In the process of entering it, one of the locks you were supposed to open right at the end just popped open and we skipped most of the room.
@@chrisassemble1282 Wow! Did you end up getting a record time? Or did they not tell you?
Lol when i did an escape room they explicitly said dont guess random codes
We played one that was actually interesting - you're prisoners who are in jail and you have to get yourself out, namely by figuring out how to get things that are outside to you. Or throwing things to the other prisoners through your bars. It was cool.
I once did an escape room that had a broken puzzle. Me and my friends spent 30 minutes trying to solve this puzzle, but nothing we did worked. Once we were done, the gamemaster tried to show us the correct solution to the puzzle (which ended being the first thing we tried when we found the puzzle), then blamed us for breaking it once they realized it didn't work.
10:15 "Sudoku puzzles should be avoided because not everyone can do math."
Austin, I think I have some news to break to you
💀💀
Yeah, I don't know why he tied 2 things together that aren't related. Would have made as much sense to say don't use color puzzles because people are bad at math and don't use sudoku puzzles because some people are color blind. Still gave the video a thumbs up.
I know right not all puzzles with numbers are math based.
@@ajbXYZcool they even have sudokus that don’t have numbers. You could just use 9 letters.
Jokes aside, technically it's still math, but not numbers-math
As an escape room lover, I agree with a lot of this video! As someone who worked in an escape room however, some of the issues are due to the reality of running a business that’s open to the public. Like, of course it’s logical to have locks that match the setting and theme for example, but when you’re having to replace locks, keys, and other props weekly because customers break them or take them, it’s gonna be really hard to keep replacing them on the spot with very specific and pricier pieces. There were multiple occasions where I had to run to a hardware store between games to buy replacements, and we’d ordered a bunch of theme-specific backups already but customers really don’t listen to anything you tell them so they constantly break/lose/take things.
10:10 Colorblind people can still see color, you just have to be careful about your choice of colors.
10:16 Sudoku involves no math. Not even basic arithmetic. You might as well have said someone might not be able to color by numbers because they don't know math.
You're right that sudoku involves no math, but it still has its own set of rules that players would need to be familiar with.
@@Reashu The rules are very simple, so as long as they're included that should be no problem.
If anything, the problem is that too many people already know how to solve Sudoku puzzles and will breeze past them.
Then they make the puzzle hard to compensate and make it inaccessible to novices.
An obscure or original puzzle format would be ideal, since virtually no one will already be an expert at it.
I was gone for most of the video, mostly uttering to myself “well it isn’t the worst thing ever” until you got to the one where the game master just gave you all the clues and it made my blood boil hard like holy shit
Pro tip, if you have a panic attack most escape rooms will let you leave
Most?
solved it!
You’re allowed to leave at any time. You’re not actually trapped
@@parmesan3638 no you are
Additional pro tip: Spice up your panic attacks with a harmonica.
I went to an Escape room once, where in the last puzzle we had to convert a specific color combination into numbers with the help of a note written on the first page of a book we had to skim through for another puzzle. But even though we were certain, that we had the correct colors and had translated them correcly according to the note we found that explicitly said: colors -> numbers, we couldn't solve the puzzle. After some time the game master came in, because he wondered why we were stuck at this fairly simple puzzle, after we had speed run most of the escape room.
Turns out, the group before us had left the note with the wrong instructions on how to convert the colors. Ruined the whole experience.
So, a few years back, I went to an escape room for my friend’s birthday. It was in my old home town, using a building that used to be used for something else, and the people there were gaming enthusiasts. My friend chose the hardest room (we never finished it in time) and it was awesome! We were supposed to be making our way through a bomb shelter and the main room was the shelter and they had two rooms next to it, one being a doctors room and the other being a missile launch room. It was so fun. Then almost that same group went to another escape room a year later and it was your usual breaking into a house and stealing money, but it was so boring. They gave us unlimited clues, the puzzles were meh, and the room theming.. or lack there of. It was billed as this nice mansion owned by this really shady business man. The guy at the front hyped up the story and then when he opened the door… One room. With a temp wall that didn’t even reach the ceiling. And the walls were these gross colors and it was so lame an easy! I really think Escape Rooms need to be better and more immersive for guests. And if you don’t have the budget or creativity to do that, then maybe this business wasn’t for you.
I feel like warnings would be nice
Like- “this room involves color puzzles. Make sure at least one of your party members is not colorblind”
Or use common game design solutions pioneered by video games and board games: 1) use colors that colorblind people can distinguish (e.g. red and blue not red and green), or 2) use both colors and symbols (so for example red is always also an ankh) so that colorblindness is irrelevant. The 2nd solution is both more achievable and more convenient for all players.
Colors and Symbols is the best. There are different types of colorblindness too, so although red/green is very common there's still some people who have trouble with red/blue.
@@danielhale1 other way to make it accesible for colorblindess is making the colors with really different values, son even in black and white they can be separated
that's a great idea!
That would be great!
In fact, escape rooms that cater to specific handicaps would be fun [e.g.: dark rooms for blind people, for example]. There are dark restaurants staffed by blind people, so both can be put in neighbouring spaces in a mall or plaza, for theming purposes.
I wonder if we could cater to people in wheelchairs, too. The idea is that the goal might be to get something at the top shelf, so how do we do it without getting out of our wheelchairs.
What about staightjackets and handcuffs, too?
As a member of the Raccoon City Police Department, all of these scenarios seem completely plausible.
A Resident Evil themed room would be amazing
@@doctaco3462 Bio-Hazard?!?
An escape room ran by a game master who sounds like Whesker would be awesome.
@@doctaco3462 It'd take a fuck ton of money so it'd never happen, but imagine if there was just a full recreation of the RCPD building that was an escape room. God that sounds like it'd be sick.
When he was describing the serial killer room i legit thought of resident evil
You can make an awesome escape room with a shed. The best escape room I've ever done was in 2 rickety sheds outside a straw maze in Idaho. It was freezing and it added to the ambiance. We only had 10 minutes and we had to work together between sheds. It wasn't elaborate, but the puzzles were good and they made the theme match the crap location
I've only been to one escape room a few years ago (Prohibition era, you and your group are alcohol suppliers, and you've got the hour in the room to figure out who ratted you out to the police, find out where your stash is and get out of there). It got me excited, but every other one I've seen advertised has been "you've been kidnapped by terrorists" or a ghost one, and it's unfortunate.
Here's one: obscure, non-intuitive puzzle does not equal hard puzzle. I was in one room where we were stuck on one step (another failure of linear rooms) where the correct step was to hug a teddy bear. ???
Like I get the teddy bear thing in theory, but being someone who would be hesitant to touch anything not essential to the puzzle out of fear of damaging something, I could see how someone would get stuck.
You could do an obscure puzzle, but youd need a lot of hints.
Austin: Don’t make puzzles too easy
Also Austin: Don’t use math, color, chess, crosswords, books, or reading.
Also also Austin: make sure to buy things from the appropriate time period, don’t use English and don’t use things that most people understand like combination locks.
Don't use numbers 1-9. Don't use letters, some people are dislexic. Don't use pictures of animals, some people have never seen an animal. 🙄🙄
Not to mention that if you were worried about them actually being an issue, there are such simple solutions.
Don’t know chess? If there’s a chess board you can have an obvious chess rules book which would fit since this person would like chess.
Worried about colour blind people being unable to solve it? Add a shape to the colour too.
Someone may not know about literature? Have a book hidden somewhere or a note stating that maybe Romeos last name in the book was Zoebqmdkwja or smth so it’s more about remembering information given to you than something else
Shitposter posting useless shit? Who would've thought
@@bloodyhell8201 I wouldn't say he's a shitposter
@@bloodyhell8201 actually no, these are salient points of critique
The first and only escape room experience I had was pretty uninspiring. It suffered from a little bit of all of these problems, but the main thing that seemed to hinder it was that you could skip parts of the room entirely. Like, you didn’t have to complete step one to start step four. So we were on step four before we even finished step two. Not unfun, just didn’t inspire me to want to go to more.
Although one idea is that you can solve a puzzle in multiple ways, or that there are multiple puzzles giving the same result. For example, an advanced puzzle could skip you forward faster, or do multiple easier ones.
@@Liggliluff The problem with that sort of design structure is that it often leaves a lot of loose ends. "What are the point of these things that we figured out if they don't do anything??"
Find a highly recommended room and try again. 😢 You Rav into a subbar puzzle. Sucks.
I heard that for 4-digit combinations where each digit is a separate puzzle, some people just solve for the first two digits and then use brute-force to get the last 2
Note that if the star counting lock had been one big star, 4 medium stars, and 9 small stars, that would probably be fine. Counting is fine as long as it's smaller numbers.
If an adult can't count to a 100 (something we have children in Kidergarden practice, that's on the adult.)
1/10 Americans is functionally illiterate. We shouldn't be encouraging that by getting rid of words.
@@kyleellis1825 It's not about being able to count, it's about being able to keep track of what you have or haven't counted. If there were 57 stars scattered about on the walls and ceiling of a room, do you think you could accurately count all of them? Odds are you'd miss one or count one twice.
@@canolathra6865 Both rooms I went to gave us a note pad. So I'll concede that if you don't get a way to write down stuff, reduce the numbers from 100 to 10-20.
I’ve worked at a small business escape room for 2 years. We’ve consecutively won our county’s “best of” award since my boss opened in 2016, so I can confidently say we’re a kick ass escape room. YET we use master combination/generic locks. A: they’re easy to replace in a hurry, when we literally have 15 minutes to reset (and our rooms are BIG) before the next group needs to be greeted. And B: we literally can’t afford otherwise, same thing with laminated clues. Most of my work day is searching deep dark nooks and crannies to find essential keys, pieces and locks that 40% of the time have been pocketed by a guest. Or I’m hot gluing them, because they were broken by either one these ungodly, animalistic 13 year old boys people are breeding these days, or an intoxicated adult. You try finding a time machine themed lock that’s only $10 more than a $8 master lock pack. It’s unrealistic and the amount of keys/locks we have to replace is too much for crafted, one of a kind pieces. We’d go bankrupt.
The issue with having custom locks is that players frequently break them, so using inexpensive locks is usually the better option. My sister works in an escape room and answered a similar complaint i made.
Biggest problems that these franchises have is with players breaking props. It's a big problem
Yeah and that ties right into modern locks being easily identifiable so you can know that’s what you need to do instead of trying to pry something open elsewhere not because you are an ape, but because you don’t know if it’s part of the game or not. The imagination is impressive and people will think all sorts of things are possibly part of the game so their attention has to be narrowed down for convenience and potential room damage. It’s just unfortunate that the thematic atmosphere of the room may suffer for it in setups without extreme well thought-out added creativity.
Then again using inexpensive locks may cheapen the experience for the guests expecting to be immersed in the world, therefore lowering the return rate.
@@accountid9681 having specific locks won't ruin the immersion compared to having good props, decorations, acting, and setting the scene. Another problem with having specially decorated locks, is that they are actually more likely to break because people are unfamiliar with them. It's just too expensive
I feel like an easy compromise is simply to paint the exterior of the standard locks in some way. They don't need to be neon green or blatantly brand new shiny straight from the store metallic.
@@Ventorath I mean, painting them a little won't hurt, as long as they are identifiable by the examples of locks presented by the game master at the beginning of the escape room game.
As an escape room designer I urge companies to never buy 100% pre-made escape rooms.
Worst and only escape room experience: We were thrown into a room with a five minute timer and the instructions were played over a low budget intercom by a guy speaking in an old western accent at the speed of an auctioneer. We failed.
5 minutes
How about the past 2 years of trying to escape your own house due to government tyranny?
@@Watchdog_McCoy_5.7x28 You can leave your house that's clear by what happened at the capitol
@@Watchdog_McCoy_5.7x28 lmao your parents' curfew isn't "government tyranny"
The only escape room I’ve been in was an Egypt theme one. It was actually amazing and had no complaints. No spotty gamemasters, and everyone had something to do and several puzzles required multiple people. Giant walls moved, a laser puzzle, actual moveable stuff and the visuals were super impressive. Not sure if it’s a super popular one but it’s in KC.
I still remember the first escape room I went to. We had to climb out of an elevator through the top hatch.
I honestly thought we'd get stuck there. Cause only a few of us were athletic and tall enough to just climb up.
But we boosted a strong guy up and he pulled us all up.
Also after crawling through a vent, the room was so dark and there was a totally sus glass tube. Once we were all in, the light inside turned on and a zombie jumpscared us.
Final part had us kill the zombie by reflecting light through glasses into a light detector thingy to turn on a machine to kill it.
Neat af.
Amogus
That's a big accessibility issue right there. Anyone disabled, elderly or just too heavy will be stuck.
@@EmissaryofWind Yeah, the room had a warning that anyone physically incapable of climbing, crawling or strenuous activities couldn't enter.
But it was the only room like that.
The other difficulties were pretty normal but boring because of it.
They should level up by making "choose your own adventure" versions of escape rooms. Like when you solve the final clue of the room, two doors open up, each leading to different scenarios with different risks and you have to decide as a group which one to go to. Takes more space to do but also could be a great premium service.
I was toying with the idea of doing a competitive room. Two people or two teams of people would be solving different sets of puzzles from each other and periodically (depending on the puzzle solved) you would either get materials to help yourself/hinder the other team or a different side to the same story. This would allow for replayability of the same room by choosing which team/side you were on at the beginning. If you combined that with your choose your own adventure idea, you could essentially have one room with four endings to the story.
My worst escape room experience is a culmination of most of your points... The premise was that a board game inventor had gone mad and locked us in his trap-filled mansion. There were 7 of us, my wife and I started locked in a bathroom and the other 5 were locked in the parlor. We needed to pass clues back and forth under the door in order to open the lock between us. My wife and I had solved all of our clues and were just trapped waiting for the other 5 to solve theirs to get the second half of the combination... To make matters worse, once we got into the final room (the kitchen), there was a scrabble board on the kitchen table with tiles glued down to it. A note was next to the board which straight up read: "To get the final key, you'll need to unlock the fridge. The combination to that lock is the sum of points for the horizontal scrabble words plus the vertical scrabble words." We had to intuitively know where the double letter/word spaces were to calculate that into our counts. we lost count so many times. A good 25 of our 60 minutes was spent counting scrabble tiles. it was awful.
One time I went to an escape. The plot was simple, you stuck in pyramid, escape before it collapses in an hour. The escape room was divided into 3 rooms. The first one was dark and to open the door we needed to put on runes in an order, while playing with flashlights, keys and chests. The second room had 4 artifacts, 4 different puzzles with filling a tube with sand, controlling marble machinery, going back into the dark room with a different cipher and colours puzzles. It was incredibly fun as the final room was a tomb with a lazer puzzle and pointing them to eyes. It was really fun, even if it wasnt the best.
I've encountered a really bad puzzle where the clue was something about "look up" and the key was actually on top of a projector connected to the ceiling. I'm a short dude. They didn't provide a stair nor a stepping stool. How should I know that I can actually climb one of the tables eventhough they explicitly in the beginning told me the rules not to climb on stuffs cause it might break them.
The worst thing about 5hat is if you climbed on the table and then fell they would say they warned you not to. Major red flag
In one escape room I did we failed because you get a clue you had to lay down on a bed to set off a sensor but, since they said don't climb on any furniture, we assumed it counted for the bed.
@@tylerrichardson3034 Don't you just love it when Escape Room contradicts itself 😂
I love the escape room near me.
I live in flanders and the theme of the escape room is 'flanders fields' you have to break into a machine gun nest accros a river, place explosive charges and blow it up.
One of the rules was that, when you are at the other side of the river, you can only whisper to make sure you don't alert the Germans.
It's based on a real mission that took place during the war and the room was recreated to look similar to what the situation looked like back then.
Best room I've done so far
The one time I had a "low production value" escape room, they had a legitimate excuse (this was at a convention where they had very limited time to set up properly, and couldn't modify too much at the venue). The other one I went to was probably one of the original good ones.
I have never been to a real escape room. The only "escape room" I have ever done was in year 6 English class where the teacher said she was going out to check her phone and then locked all the doors and explained over the intercom in a creepy voice that we needed to solve a bunch of puzzles if we wanted to go home. I cried.
great video btw.
Yeah that's definitely illegal
@@datenegassie probably! though i do assume she was lying about not letting us leave if we didnt succeed. Im hoping it was just to set the mood.
I agree that the best approach is to tailor the story to the space and budget. Say you only have access to a very boring office space with white walls and fluorescent lighting. Then deck it out like an actual office--a water cooler, some cubicles, a computer, and a broken printer. Printing clues on laminated paper won't seem out of place, and writing clues on a whiteboard will be fine, too. But locks will seem out place. So less of an escape room and more of a mystery room.
my favorite ever escape room was in 7th grade, when our whole class was stressed bc of school, so instead of taking a test on "The Hound of the Baskervilles", we convinced our teacher to let us split up into groups and make our own escape rooms in the spare classroom next door. You needed a surface understanding of the book to finish the room, and it was a fun challenge to create a room that could be set up/ cleaned out in under 5 minutes. The added bonus was that we all got 100s on that project.
Looking forward to Austin's next video "I built my own escape room"
LPL: this lock is so simple, I can open it with my mind
Let’s see 1 is binding…
Halfway through this I got to thinking it would be fun to see the LPL destroy an escape room in a matter of minutes.
@@legendarygary2744
I thought the exact same 😂
I wish he would do a video about it. Especially if it were a BAD frustrating one and he'd get a unbeatable speed record.
I have worked at 2 escape rooms now and this stuff is definitely a problem. I will say the one I work at now has really high production value and actually pretty descent puzzles and sets, so they aren’t all bad 😄
For anyone interested Break Out Studios in San Jose is actually pretty decent and it’s a mom and pop business, the owners are really nice.
Once you have descent puzzles, it's all downhill from there.
I was once at a volcano-themed escape room. At one point we were working on a letter lock and all of a sudden the "volcano" made a loud roaring noise, and I was startled and dropped the lock...and it shattered into several pieces. The GM came in with a look of great exasperation and the whole game stopped while he put it back together. 😂
Back when the novelty was just getting started I went to this one called trapped in a room with a zombie. Not only was there the clues you had to find and specially built rooms, but after a few minutes a zombie would appear from a chest, and every so often their chain would grow in length. At some points later on the next piece of the puzzle would be in a place where the zombie could now touch you. People would try distracting the zombie so the other people could get those pieces. It was really cool.
I remember hearing about that one years ago. Seattle?
@@jeffwei They were EVERYWHERE.
Honestly, I feel like a survival horror themed room could work very well. Games like Resident Evil established the trope of logic puzzles that have no logical reason to be there years ago. You could lean into that to make something that could be pretty fun.
In a town near me there is a small escape room business. A couple years ago I went and did a small beginners one. It started off with decoding symbols and finding hidden keys but soon it turned into moving bookshelves and doing intricate puzzles that required lots of teamwork and creative thinking. I keep going back every half year or year to do new rooms. That experience inspired me to think more creatively and out of the box. It kickstarted my love for escape rooms.
That's pretty cool =)
The more stuff that moves in a room (in a semi-structured, orderly way) the better. That's got to be one of the laws of escape rooms.
I was in an two different escape rooms and both times the interior was broken- doors, which should pop open were stuck, tiny mechanics would pop out of their sockets, needing the help of a GM to get the next key out of the machinery...
The worst puzzle was substracting two five-digit number to get a code just by calculating it in your head... it was unnecessary complicated to stretch the time.
Bad GM story: we were on time (15 minutes before start) and the GM won't let us in, because "I'm not payed to let you in early". It was winter. And kinda cold. 2nd Escape Room had the same GM (or a sibling, because they looked strikingly similar) and both times I felt they really hate their job. They were just reading the rules in a monotone voice and opened the door.
It's a bit like an MMO: it's only fun, because you have fun with friends, but as stand alone entertainment they're kinda boring.
Whilst doing an escape room, my uncle jump scared himself with two magnetic chess pieces.
Th only escape room I’ve ever been to was super mario themed. We had to save princess peach and go through different room that each had a different theme level. To go to the nest room we had to collect stars to open the doors and the after we solved the last puzzle the exit was a slide that looked like one of the green pipes in the game. Super fun, super immersive, 10/10 would recommend
Honestly the best escape rooms I've been to with solid, unique puzzles were ones with cheesy plots that Austin probably would not have liked, but the nature of the puzzles were such that while they were genuinely fantastic and what I want out of escape rooms, I can't imagine a plot that could possibly match them
We have done the "Haunted Room" in a few ways over the years. One was a fully written story, VERY loosely based on a local legend, that people can actually look up online. The haunt is in an old cabin, has an actual plot, with a short video at the beginning. The puzzles and props fit the actual story, and you aren't just "escaping", you are completing the story, and when you do, the ending video is like the ending of a movie.
Another is a haunted old mansion, but again, tells the story of a wealthy old man that became a recluse when his wife died. And after he disappeared, the old place became the "haunted house" of the area, that supposedly held a treasure. When playing the game, you learn about the man and his wife, learn why the man vanished, and what his treasure actually is. You then help the ghostly couple and complete their story.
I completely agree about the set-dressing. So many rooms are "just the office". One secret, if you don't have a ton of money to turn an office into a private ship... choose a theme that fits what you have! We just completely re-modeled a a room originally was just an office, and turned it from a "beachside cottage" to a haunted mansion. Building the ENTIRE THING took less than $1000. Paint, some wood to make faux wainscoting, a free grandfather clock from Facebook Marketplace, some wall sconces from Hobby Lobby, old furniture from Goodwill and fake spiderwebs made from hot melt glue go a long way!
It wasn't an escape room, but one time I was doing a puzzle where one part of it had a sheet of music that we were supposed to play on a piano to figure out which song it was, and one girl in our group just starts singing the notes. Turns out she can tell what note it is just by looking at it, we didn't even need the piano, it was great.
I remember doing an escape room back in like 2016 and it was so low budget. Run by some people who looked like if we didn’t get out they were gonna sell us. There was one bit where we had to build a crossbow and shoot out a ‘security camera’. Great experience. There were genuinely iron bars on the window. Puzzles were well thought out and the rewards we reaped for getting to each new area was amazing
I generally feel like a lot of Escape Rooms would do really well by watching old shows like Crystal Maze or Krypton Factor, it's free puzzle material
There were a few North American literal escape-room game-shows around the 2010's like _Estate of Panic_ or _Exit_ as well as some other game-shows inspired by videos games like _Cha$e._ They were cheesy but fun.
@@user-vn7ce5ig1z There was also *Race to Escape* as well if I remember correctly.
A while back, I went to an escape room in Fort Worth called The Hidden Chambers (specifically the Edgar Allen Poe Adventure) and it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. My group completed it with two minutes on the clock.
We did one where we were supposed to find our great aunt's treasure. They had one clue to a late puzzle just sitting out; with that, we skipped about half the room. According to the owner, "most people don't notice it." Sigh.
You can get away with something like that only if there's no obvious relationship between the solution and the puzzle until you reveal it later. But it's usually better to just hide the puzzle or the solution until the right time.
The opposite is true, too. We had a door in one room that just didn't lock. About 50% of teams needed a hint to just open the door. Another 10% thought they were being clever by reaching through bars in the door and opening it from the other side. Eventually I just installed a lock and put a key in the room.
you've said a lot of "don't"s but i didnt hear too many "do"s. as someone who has never played an escape room i now only know what bad puzzles are and only got some vague explanations to what a good puzzle would be. i wanted an example to be honest. although i guess i could consider the vague ideas of what a good puzzle would be as a puzzle in and of itself
i disagree, he went into a lot of dos by ommisions of the dont
this isnt a video about how properly to make an escape room, its about the negatives of the current escape room industry
however i do find a lot of what he said to have some practical value in improving your escape rooms, such as using era appropriate locks, having a causal chain of events that makes sense given the scenario as well as part of the play-reward loop (something i legitmately covered in my game design degree) on how difficulty and emotion interact, too hard and its anxiety inducing and too easy and its boring
@@azzzertyy it literaly has "let's fix them" in the title
@@azzzertyy
"such as using era appropriate locks"
With how often shit breaks in escape rooms, I wouldn't be surprised if this is kinda unfeasible for some
Austin thinks he lives in a small town, he hasn’t seen everywhere near where I live
I once lived in a village with one stop sign. I consider *that* to be a small town.
@@KellyLoom1s If you live in the US, I don't know how that is possible. Even a crossroads town would likely have 2-8 stop signs. /hj
I live in a town of 10,000 I think it’s a big town.
@@elijaha773 Rudolph, Ohio. Check it out if you’re interested. The stop sign is by the post office. 👍🏻
Edit: Pedantically speaking there are four actual signs, as it’s a 4-way stop. I just meant at the time I lived there, about 15 years ago, it was the sole signed stoppage within the actuality of Rudolph.
@@KellyLoom1s looks like Rudolph is an unincorporated community and census-designated place, not a small town
Ha! defeated with FActs and LOgic!
I've done an IRL escape room exactly once and it was pretty rad, but my favorite implementation of the medium has been with VR games. Obviously they have their own limitations to deal with, but there's a lot more freedom in puzzle design in a virtual environment, and they can do things you couldn't get away with IRL, like killing the player.
When I stayed in an escape room there was no narrative. And that made the random jumble of puzzles quite engaging. These narratives sound quite ridiculous. The narrative at my escape room was “you’re trapped, can you get out?” And then there was weird stuff that later turned out to be a story. It was Cool.
i was in an escape room last week and i can say my experience over the years hasn't included most of these problems but i do live in a country/town that doesn't have many escape rooms so i can say you're right this might be a problem stemming for oversaturation
I work at an escape room, and I’m glad to see that our business meets most of your demands
I don't believe in relying on mental teamwork for fun.
Sorry, I’m going to be THAT person and tell you that there is NO MATH in sudoku.
It’s 9 numbers that cannot have repeated numbers in the same grid, the same row vertically and horizontally.
Logic is a field of mathematics
I hope he just used the wrong term. But still, you could add the numbers together and it should equal 45 on each row, column and square. But Sudoku doesn't need numbers anyway; it needs 9 unique symbols. It would be interesting to have 9 letters, and have it spell out the clue in text.
Notification feeds are broken. Let's fix them.
Dude. No kidding.
@@austinmcconnell make a mailing list!
I did one escape room that was super creative, it was a generic prison setting, but it started off with the group split up into 2 cells, and having to work together to pass information/keys through the walls, after escaping it turned into this sort of sewer crawl where you have to find your way out of the prison before the "warden caught you". it was super fun
So I personally work at an escape room in Utah, and I think we are themed very well, have good flow, and our actors and game masters are amazing. But one thing that gets on my nerves is the fact that our building has no ceiling in the wear house. So while you are in the haunted room, you can also hear the screams from the nuclear power plant. Or you can hear the game masters and actors in their tiny cold room as they talk about stuff going on in the rooms. Otherwise it’s a very detailed and fun play.