Escape Rooms Are Broken. Let's Fix Them. 

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

It never occurred to me that escape rooms are one-shot role playing sessions. Wow, mind blown.

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.

"WE NEED A HINT" Message seen, left on read.

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.

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.

I've only done one actual escape room, I was an Egypt themed one, and everything was going fine (other than the fact that I felt like there wasn't enough for me to do and I was kind of bored) until the last puzzle, it turns out that the previous group had done the whole thing and escaped, and then they people who owned the escape room hadn't reset the last puzzle, meaning that the ending was ruined for us.

"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.

"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.

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”.

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.

Austin : escape rooms are too easy Me: needs to call for hints after getting stuck for two hours on the first clue in a room labeled "beginner"

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

So I had one of the best Game Master ever in a petty generic room, So before hand my group were joking that as the theme was a detective instigation that we should pretend to be characters from Brooklyn 99. Our game master clearly heard us so when we got stuck he called in as captain Holt and stay in character the whole time. He was best. We gave him a good tip after.

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”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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'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.

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.

Themes for escape rooms are what made me excited to go at first, then I remembered I live in Louisiana and the escape rooms were stuff i grew up hearing about. Swamp shacks, voodoo rooms, bayous, and stuff like that. It was cool at first, then I realized “oh shit, this is what people from other states think Louisiana looks like”

Correction: her boss was having her game master 5 games at once. That sounds like hell.

In Seoul, they had one with a piano. We found some sheet music and we had to press the right keys to unlock something. 5 of us? No one reads sheet music. Fucking madness. One guy had to plumb the depths of his 8 yo self and he finally got it but it took up a third of our time.

I kinda wanna play or design a room that’s the traditional “mystery author or architect hiding clues to the will/artifact/fortune” tale. It’s cliche but it fits narratively, can have a great set of puzzles, and the room could look amazing. There’s a reason that’s such a trope in stories.

I played an escape room in Reading, PA that had an alien ship theme, and the puzzles were designed to reflect the logic of aliens unfamiliar with Earth culture. Rather than being based on word or number combinations, they were themed around symbols and patterns

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.

Oh no...he's totally gonna challenge himself to make an escape room in 48 hours isn't he?

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 :)

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.

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’d love to see an examination of the origins of escape rooms and their relation to early online flash games of the same nature

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!

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 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).

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 😅

gonna have to disagree with the "not everyone can do math" point- definitely don't think escape rooms should expect you to calculate logarithms or solve a quadratic formula in your head but sudoku is literally counting from 1 to 9, and if you can't do your times tables then make sure someone in your group can 🤷

I've been super into escape rooms ever since my first when I was younger. I even designed one for my buddy for his birthday in a friend's half finished garage, which he said he really enjoyed. I've always thought it would be cool to make some sort of modular concept for an escape room. It's always been a one and done thing, and if you want to go with other people again, it's hard not to ruin the experience for them. Maybe if the group is smaller, there's less puzzles, and as you add more people the room complexity can expand? Or a room where individual decisions can impact the outcome, so if you come back it could be a fresh experience if people chose differently. Adding layers, maybe the objective is not just to escape, but to escape and also have the most gold coins collected out of everyone. You can be greedy and try to solve all the puzzles, but be too greedy and you all might not make it out alive. Or even, let's say if the time runs out in the Mayan temple, you may have failed the exploration mission to find the crystals, but now you have 10 minutes to escape before being drowned in lava. That way it gives you a little something in the end to mini "win", not just "Oh times up you lose." I guess I see there's a big market for an escape room that can shift and change for replayability, offering a different experience each time but being themed the same to avoid having to build a new one.

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 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've been designing and hosting Escaperooms for almost 6 years and have to say you hit the nail with this one! I do have to say tho that the enjoyment of the room also lies with the groups playing the room. If you have a group of unmotivated people its gonna be a lot harder to give them the experience you want.

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.

10:15 "Sudoku puzzles should be avoided because not everyone can do math." Austin, I think I have some news to break to you

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 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

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.

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.

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.

My worst escape room experience was casino-themed room, that had one of puzzles that required to look out of the window on the opposite building for numbers required for unlocking a safe. One thing that owner did not take into account are trees that have grown in years that the room operated and made it basically impossible to complete

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.

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.

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 went to a really cool escape room that was so amazing it was in the basement of a school that had been abandoned and turned into a haunted house but in the off seasons they did escape rooms and like axe throwing. The plot of the room was kids getting trapped in a school basement in like a gross locker room. And the puzzles them selves were cool two there was a puzzle where we had to creat a human chain and touch two things to let electricity flow through us (we couldn’t even feel it), and there was like running water, people would have to put their hands in these dark boxes and it included like a map of the town we were in as a big part of the story. Overall it was amazing so if you are in Connellsville PA check out Crawford school of terror. Idk if they have the same room but it was so cool I would highly recommend.

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.

"Avoid sudoku puzzles because not everyone can do math." Ey, it's logic.

16:51 “Also… build a website?” That’s the best ad transition I’ve ever seen

Back in 2018 we did a room that was themed around us finding the whereabouts of a missing egyptology professor. We get trapped inside the room and have to use his "research" to get out. The final puzzle was about using a statue placed in certain locations around the room and pointing in the directions indicated by hiroglyphs we had be translating and interpreting throughout the puzzle. The owner had brought in sand and everything. It was incredibly immersive and well designed. I loved it.

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.

So logical immersion has never been an issue for me. I’ve considered escape rooms to be real life video games. So the serial killer having a combination lock to his kitchen doesn’t bother me. It’s game logic. I do agree that more setting appropriate locks would be nice, though. But it’s probably hard to get enough when people tend to break them and businesses change out the rooms every few months.

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

My first and only escape room in was in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It had 3 different themed rooms and my friend group (there were 6 of us) chose a jail based around the 1970s in the Caribbean, probs something related to dictatorship & we were incarcerated unjustly by first world standards. The narrative was that a past inmate was incarcerated for fighting a corrupt government. He orchestrated an escape plan, but was later sentenced to death and planted his journal filled with poetic clues to find tools and padlock combinations to make it easier for the next inmates in his unfortunate situation to escape. We were all together in a room and inside a cell (about 10/10ft cell & 10/20ft room. unrealistic, but I didn’t pay attention to that because it was so damn fun). There was a metallic toilet (probably so it can’t be leveraged by the inmates. It had a locked maintenance door on the back we had to open to find one piece of a metal pipe), a wooden booth with bedding ontop & a trap door (where the locked boxes were hidden), a poster on one wall (part of a puzzle), scratch marks counting days (part of a puzzle), a painting on another wall (part of a puzzle) & a fan with numbers painted on each blade. The locked boxes had locks with 4 digit codes & we found the journal to decipher the right number combinations for the locks based on numbers we’d find written on the objects & markings in the room. We found a UV flashlight in one of the boxes to search for invisible numbers written in tattered books for the rest of the locks and slowly piece together a long L shaped pipe (probably the reason why the toilet didn’t work) to reach the key to the cell on a key hanger on the other side of a pillar that we could only see by using a mirror on the far wall. Just outside the cell was a desk with a computer, a calendar on the wall, documents in a locked cabinet & a chess set with pre-placed pieces (requiring the order of named pieces matched to their placement on the board to decipher the 4 digits) who’s clues we had to piece together to unlock the door to the room itself. We only managed to decipher half of the desk’s clues before the 40min ran out. The whole time we had people looking at each item in the room, looking for patterns to figure out if it clued toward digits or was a distraction and one person reading the journal (only 2 pages worth of entries on important *dated* events throughout his incarceration, his backstory & some poetry). The reader would take turns with each person, trying to match information to clues in the room & then trying the 4 digits on each locked box until one opens & that puzzle gets discarded. We also had a radio the GM gave us so we could ask for 3 hints, each time she would ask which puzzles we had done and would give us very useful hints about where we could look or what part of the journal corresponded to what clue in the room so we wouldn’t have to try every possibility) Some of the less believable ones can be explained by saying he found a way to obtain the items needed for the escape (the lock boxes, locks & the flashlight) & found the codes for the locks used on the guards’ desk. He then searched for pre-existing documents and items (perhaps the chess set belongs to the guard, who just leaves it there & he took advantage of it) as clues to hint at the number combinations in his journal without it being obvious if the guards ever check it. If you can’t tell, I loved it despite it being relatively low budget cuz it just looked like an old colonial jail repurposed by a modern, corrupt & stingy government. Highly accurate for the Caribbean XD (I laugh to not cry). It was also like $20 per person

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. 😂

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pro tip, if you have a panic attack most escape rooms will let you leave

As a member of the Raccoon City Police Department, all of these scenarios seem completely plausible.

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 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 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.

I didn't experience it myself, but I thought about a solution to that Egyptian theme room that was using English and mismatched locks. I was thinking that a group of Grave Robbers had reached the tomb (assuming it is a tomb) before your group of archeologists or criminal investigators, and placed a bunch of locks and puzzles to keep anyone else out. They did this to buy time so that they may get whatever equipment they needed to remove the treasure inside. Your goal is to unlock all of the locks to get the artifact, or incriminating evidence on the group before they return. Also, to the possible questions as to why there are clues left behind and hints can be given is that there is a traitor or a mole in the group of grave robbers that left some clues behind an gives hints when called. The mole can only give a few hints as to not expose themselves. A little fun extra story to get people to try a second time even if succeed, is that if all the hints are used, the mole is exposed and is killed by the grave robbers. Though the mole has to be likable enough that the group would feel bad about getting him killed.

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 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

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 always enjoyed the rooms designed for large groups where it was likely that you’d have at least one person with some sort of niche skillset or knowledge. Having someone good at wordplay, math, geography, etc. There was one room I played that covered a wide range of topics and it was the best time I’ve ever had.

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.

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.

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

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. ???

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

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.

The first escape room I went with was a spy theme. It was rather immersive and seemed to be good. Though we barely got any progress for like 30 minutes. None of us realized we had to pull at a fake outlet to get a key until someone was crazy enough to do it. This would have been neat except the warning contract said to not to touch outlets. We nearly got out afterwards but at that point we wasted so much time looking for that key that we didn't have enough time to get everything.

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.

The best one I’ve ever been to was inspired by the original Saw movie, and had such a great twist where once you think you’ve beat it, the room switches to a black light and has puzzles that you never would’ve been able to see until you hit that point, it was so much fun

our friends and i tried an ancient egypt escape room on halloween, it was AMAZING. it was well decorated with so many artifacts and the entire floor was covered in sand. the walls were “sandstone” and it had 3 sub-levels, each decorated beautifully as well. pretty cheap too, 120 for 4 people.

LPL: this lock is so simple, I can open it with my mind

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.

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.

This put into words exactly how I feel about escape rooms! My worst escape room was the last one I went to. My partner and I have been doing rooms for 4 years together, often playing just the 2 of us. We've done over 100 rooms. This room... I rate it -20/10. They really had to work at being bad. It starts out with one of the owners reading you a loooong story related to the room you're going to be in. Then a different game master (who remains with you the entire time) takes you to the room. The one we played had 3 room sections and we were told we get 35 min in the 1st room, 30 in the 2nd, and 15 min in the last. If we don't finish the previous room, we still move forward. Im thinking "okay, weird but different , maybe they'll make it work". Then we start "playing"... it's just me, my partner, and a friend. I've brought my infant along (not the first time I've brought him to a game) mostly cause it was a last minute decision to go play a room, but we've won rooms with him in a carrier on me before so- not a big deal. While looking around for clues in a very dark room (with not so great mini head lamps) we can't find anything. I do what I normally do when I get into a room: out loud I start listing the different locks I see so that we know what we might be looking for. I give up about halfway through. There are probably 20+ locks in that room alone. And we find out very quickly that the "answers" are all random words/dates semi related to the story we were read at the beginning- a story that was no where to be found in the room. I quickly got tired and annoyed and did not hold back my snark when the gm starting acting like we should know the answers off the top of our heads. I definitely looked like a Karen while holding my child and telling the attendant "I don't know what years jack the ripper killed his victims. Yes I understand it was the same years so and so went abroad. But no where in this room do we have that information!" I'm pretty sure I was near growling when her response was "Do you want another math equation as your 'hint'". The rooms got progressively worse and at one point the game Master even says "oh, this one you can't do without my help", then proceeds to make up riddles for us to answer, then flip the numbers to get the code. Except if you flip the numbers completely you actually get the wrong code- you had to just flip the order you got the numbers in. 🙄 and I cannot reiterate enough that the answers were almost always no where in the room. Sometimes, the answers could be found by figuring out a riddle, and then having to make that word into a 5 letter word to fit the lock. For example "Philadelphia" had to become "Phili" (which just made no sense in my mind, at least do phily and get rid of one of the l's in philly. Why fully change it?). Since there were so many locks, the moment we got a combo we thought would fit, we had to try it on ALL the locks of that type. Nothing told you which combo went to which lock. And the game was very linear, so until you opened the next lock you had no guesses what the others could be. Even though even when you did get the new info, it was still a lot of just guessing what the person's name who was one of the 20+ victims named in the story was, because why would you remember all of that info. Most of it was all just a history lesson rehash if the story we had been told, with the chance to shock (for real- actually, physically shock) your friends in an electric chair if you lost. We opted out, though we did lose, and thank goodness I brought the baby because they acted like he was the only reason they weren't going to force us to shock each other. We found out after that the reason they have time limits on the sections of the game were so that they could run it with 3 different teams at the same exact time. The semi funny ending is that they had a little free gift box promo for Halloween, and if you happened to get one with a gold coin inside then you could play one of their other rooms for free. Mine had the gold coin in it. I'm keeping it as a momento to never go back- even for free it's just a waste of time. Sorry for the rant! Tl;Dr The last escape room I did really sucked and even a free pass couldn't bring me back there

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.

I've appreciated the difficulty of good escape room design since I saw the People Make Games video on them, and that of making good puzzles from GMTK's puzzle video. Basically I oughta give game design an honest try just to understand how good the pros are at it

I love the idea of an escape room, but I've never been to a good one and at this point I'm not sure if I want to keep trying. I have encountered almost every problem you mentioned from bad design to bad GMs. The worst one was a 14qm cellar room with a Wild West theme. The GM didn't give us hints but downright told us the solution to multiple locks. The puzzles didn't fit the theme at all. The final one was literally a Kindergarten labyrinth on a printed piece of paper which killed any pacing the game had left. Speaking of the pacing: Somewhere towards the end we were given a small pistol that shot tiny plastic balls. The GM has kinda hyped this beforehand and told us we should call her when we find it (thanks for the spoiler btw). We than had to take turns firing at a small target. That doesn't sound to bad, does it? Thing is, it had nothing to do with any puzzle. The GM just added our scores from the target together, told us how many points we made and wrote it on the final 'You made it in X time' - Certificate. It was kinda hilarious in hindsight.

We're in the middle of building our second room and the lengthiest part of the process has been addressing virtually every issue you talked about. Spot on!