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Changing the Game

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Mechanics & Game Play: Changing the Game Part 2 of 3

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With so many escape rooms opening up each year, one of the most important traits a new game needs in order to stand out is unique gameplay mechanics. Most escape rooms follow a pretty standard formula when creating their experience. Basically, your group will be locked in a room together with puzzles and clues hidden throughout the room. You must solve puzzles to unlock puzzles and then solve those puzzles. Once you have solved enough puzzles your group finds a way to escape the room.

That formula is tried and true and can produce very effective experiences. However, if you follow this formula, then your room will compete for space in the memories of your players; especially if you share a theme with other rooms. In essence, the more qualities your room shares with other rooms, the more likely it is to be forgotten in the sea of experiences.

This is why Luke and Madison Rhoades set out to create an escape room that did things differently than any other escape room at the time. The Hex Room, Cross Roads’ first escape room experience, altered the formula to put each and every player in the hot seat at the same time. Rather than allowing your team mates to carry you through the horror experience, the Hex Room requires that each and every player contribute to the game or risk causing the untimely deaths of their entire team.

In the Hex Room, each player takes a personality test before the game to determine which stereotypical horror movie character their personality best fits. Casting players into these archetypes serves two goals. One, it heightens immersion by making the players excited to see which character they got (complete with costumes of course). Two, it lets us know which room each player will be starting in.

Each player will be divided between six different rooms and forced to find ways to communicate and pass clues between the rooms while being physically isolated from their team mates. This adds a challenging new obstacle to the game: the level of communication that is required to succeed was drastically increased. Gone were the days where a team member could point, grunt, and say “look at what I found.” Now the players were expected to not only find their clues, but adequately describe what they found to their team mates. On top of this, each player was now responsible for solving puzzles on their own.

Rather than the entire team focusing on one or two puzzles at a time before moving onto more puzzles, players were working on up to 6 puzzles at once all while screaming to their leader, the Detective, for help. Add in a large timer counting down, movie-quality set design, and suspenseful music, and you have a great recipe for a truly memorable experience.

Sprinkle on a hint system that can only be used when dispatch manages to patch into the detective’s office phone, and you have yourself a brand-new breed of escape room; a fully immersive escape room focused on the goal of creating completely different experiences within the room for each and every single player.

These sorts of innovations are what allows Cross Roads Escape Games to stand out amongst the rapid spread of the escape room hype. It has been several years since the Hex Room was opened and it has gone through many changes and revamps, but its beloved gameplay mechanics have allowed it to compete in the market even to today.

Jason Sakal
Game Master and Manager at Cross Roads Escape Games
Magic Puzzle Wizard Genius

changing the game

Actors and Interactivity, a Focus on The Fun House

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Changing The Game Part One:

Actors and Interactivity, a Focus on The Fun House

Escape rooms have been exponentially advancing in puzzle design, creative tech installations, and immersive elements, and some rooms do this VERY well. Here is part 1 of 3 where Jason talks about actors, interactivity, immersive elements, and how we utilize them all in The Fun House!

 

One way that escape rooms have tried to change the game is by incorporating elements of immersive theatre to their rooms. Usually, this takes the form of an actor or actors that play certain roles within the room. By adding actors to your room, you can increase the immersion for players by giving them a living, breathing part of the game to interact with. The actors can be used to illicit a variety of emotional responses from the players, based on what theme the room is.

For instance, if you were designing a horror room you could implement a scare actor to pop out and frighten the players adding an aura of dread that will follow the players as they open each new room. On the flip side of that, you could always employ an actor to play a funny or silly character. A great example of this is The Great and Amazing Zoltar, the Seer of Secrets who resides in our Fun House.

Zoltar interacts with players by telling really bad “Dad jokes”, puns, and by being strange and bizarre. Zoltar serves a dual function: he adds to the wacky atmosphere of the game with his witty humor and narcissistic demands for compliments, while also serving as our game’s hint system. Regardless of how Zoltar is utilized by the players, simply being a live, interactive experience enriches the overall atmosphere of the room.

Instead of having a game master enter the room to give hints, he is always present and feels like an interactive agent for progress that works with the players. Often times we have players that spend the entire game joking and interacting with Zoltar, never once using him as a hint system. One player said it best when she commented that “the game would not feel the same without Zoltar. I couldn’t imagine playing through The Fun House without picking fun at him at least once.”

The key to a successful interactive Escape Room element is, you guessed it, immersion. When a player approaches Zoltar and tries their best to flatter and persuade him onto their side, it feels like it is part of the game. The players are not just standing around waiting for someone to show up and point something out, resulting in getting pulled out from the immersion. Instead, they are playing a sort of minigame with Zoltar where their reward is a riddle, piece of elderly advice, or joke that points them in the right direction. They are immersed in the experience while receiving hints AND while completing the room.

Next time on “Changing the Game” with Jason, we discuss game play mechanics and obstacles with examples from our beloved Hex Room!

Jason Sakal
Game Master and Manager at Cross Roads Escape Games
Magic Puzzle Wizard Genius