The premise of most escape games is simple: a team of players is “locked” inside a themed room, and must solve an interlinking series of puzzles in order to escape. The room can be any size, the puzzles elaborate or simple, the theming gritty and realistic or cartoonish and weird. The only unifying characteristic of these games is the idea of busting out of something, be that a malfunctioning spaceship or a historically-inaccurate replica of Alcatraz.
In the latter half of 2020, the idea of being trapped in a confined space with half-a-dozen random strangers feels… uncomfortable. The discomfort becomes more acute when you consider that, in most cases, escape rooms contain so many props, devices and surfaces that completely sanitising one during a 15-minute changeover period between games is impossible.
No wonder, then, that many escape game enthusiasts thought the pandemic (and the ensuing wave of national lockdowns) would spell the end for their favourite venues. After all, how could a business that depended on immersion in a physical space continue operating when everyone was legally required to remain at home? The industry, many felt, was doomed.
This turned out to be not entirely the case. For some venues the pandemic was, indeed, the end of the line. For others, it was an opportunity to try something new.
The Escape Game (TEG) — a US-based escape room franchise — was among the first to start offering games via Zoom. The company owned dozens of rooms across 18 venues, the majority of which sat empty during the early days of lockdown. With some swift adaptations, these games were modified to welcome virtual players.
Online escape rooms (sometimes called “live video” or “digital” escape rooms) proliferated quickly. Within months, hundreds of venues from all over the world had made the switch to conference call gaming. Directories sprang up to let players keep track of the games they’d enjoyed, and help them to co-ordinate with venues that might be operating in different time zones.
While there were variations, the setup for these online rooms was similar. The most important component was the avatar — a staff member with an earpiece and a webcam who assumed the role of the players inside the room. During the game, the avatar’s job was to listen to player instructions, move around and interact with objects as requested, and feed back to players anything that wasn’t obvious through the webcam. Which panel did that mysterious clunk come from? A good virtual escape game avatar would tell you before you’d even asked.
Many games also offered an inventory system — an online widget that showed an illustration of important items found by the players. Some games went a step further and borrowed other innovations from video games, giving players a map of the room to help them navigate, or adding to the story with video cut scenes and briefings.
There were a lot of things that didn’t quite work about online escape games. One thing missing, for many players, was the intangible thrill of immersion. Telling someone to cut a wire to defuse a “bomb” carried less of a sensory thrill than doing it yourself. You didn’t notice your fingers shaking, didn’t have to wrangle the narrow jaws of the pliers into place, didn’t feel the threat of the bomb’s proximity, or the effort required to slice the wire.
In his paper “Ask Why: Creating a Better Player Experience through Environmental Storytelling and Consistency in Escape Room Design”, Professor Scott Nicholson explains one reason why escape games are so engaging. “One aspect that makes escape rooms different from most other types of gaming is the strong connection between the player and the avatar he or she is playing in the game. Unlike screen-based games where there is a separation between the player and the avatar in the game world, in escape games the player and the avatar are the same.”
This aspect of escape gaming was lost, of course, by the translation from an immersive experience to a screen-based one.
At the same time that this immersion was lost for the player, much of the fun was lost on the avatar who took their place. The poor staff member had, after all, likely defused that bomb a thousand times before the experience was no longer thrilling to them. Indeed, it might often (quite understandably) have been a struggle for an avatar to remain invested and enthused while waiting for players to reach a puzzle solution which they already knew.
Avatar issues aside, rooms which worked well for in-person play didn’t necessarily retain their greatness when taken online. Some puzzles simply weren’t suited for online play. Giant sliding block puzzles, for example, are fun when you take them on in The Crystal Maze, but a nightmare when you’re trying to walk someone else to a solution using nothing more than words and gestures.
I encountered this issue during my first ever online game. In a space themed room, each puzzle rewarded my team with one piece of a complicated three-dimensional jigsaw which, come the climax of the game, we’d have to assemble and thrust into the heart of a damaged computer. Except… we couldn’t really participate in the assembly. The pieces all looked the same, and none of us had the language to convey that this bit should go underneath-but-also-on-top of this bit. The avatar, clearly aware of this issue, discreetly averted the camera while he solved the puzzle for us. “Let me just get this for you,” he said, dropping momentarily out of character.
There were also the issues that affect conference calls in any context. A team of six excitable players (all with their own ideas of what should happen next) would often struggle to communicate clearly to their avatar. Added to that were lag, unstable internet connections, and the odd loss of sound or visuals.
For some players, these negatives were enough to invalidate online escape games. Better to wait until physical locations opened again, they decided, than to put up with experiences that were, in some ways, sub optimal.
For others, however, digital escape rooms opened up a wealth of possibilities.
Suddenly, games situated on the other side of the world were available to play online. You could experience them without even leaving your home. It was no longer necessary to travel to Croatia to experience Puzzle Punks’s highly-regarded Game of Thrones room. You could play it, or any of a thousand other games spread across the world, without leaving your desk. No travel expenses. No long drives. No need to even change out of your pyjamas.
As well as eliminating travel for far-flung games, escaping digitally meant you could be flexible with your team. In normal times it would be an expensive endeavour to play a game with a friend from a different country. Now, having your international friends on your team was as simple as co-ordinating time zones (which, to be fair, wasn’t that simple, but it was still easier than travelling).
During the first few weeks of lockdown I travelled the world. I’d never before had the chance to play an escape game in the US, but now I played three in a single day. I experienced flashy, big-budget games in Las Vegas, eerily-convincing serial-killer-themed games in Budapest, and half a dozen games I’d been saving for my next trip to London (without having to navigate the Tube between each one).
There were completely new games too. A surge in digital players lowered the cost of entry for makers to the point that an enterprising amateur could put together a genius playable experience with almost no resources. Games could be based in living rooms and bathrooms. They could be improvised and weird and brilliant. They could be designed specifically to take advantage of the new digital format that had been thrust upon the industry.
Ready Mayor One — a game by Rock Avenue Escape — was widely praised by enthusiasts. In it, you took on the role of a secret agent guiding the movements of a town’s (convincingly inept) mayor as he tried to untangle a sinister mystery. Not only did it have an excellent story and working inventory system, but players could also trigger items in the room from their computer, restoring some of the sensory thrill of live puzzle solving.
YouEscape, meanwhile, was creating homemade games on a subscription basis — treasure hunts which blended immersive escape room puzzles with online scavenger hunts and digital files full of clues. YouEscape made full use of its online format to include puzzles that simply wouldn’t work in a brick-and-mortar room. Letting the general public rewire motors, mix chemicals, and play with actual fire was out of the question in most conventional escape games, but completely doable when anything remotely dangerous was handled by a trained avatar.
Many venues (such as the bizarre but brilliant clueQuest in the UK) also dipped into paper-based puzzling by creating print-at-home puzzle packs. These downloadable games could be played from the comfort of your own home, and featured two-dimensional takes on some of the puzzles you might find in their rooms.
In short, there was a boom in creativity. Rather than restricting the number of games, lockdown vastly increased the options available to the average player, and transformed the industry almost overnight.
In some parts of the world, normality has — more or less — resumed. Lockdowns have ended. Businesses have re-opened, escape game venues included. The surge of creativity and adaptation has given way to an ongoing struggle for survival.
Some games have been quick to return to business as usual… or almost as usual, anyway: venues have introduced measures which range from regular disinfectant mists to socially-distanced briefings. In America, private games (just you and your friends, no random strangers) have become the norm — a welcome change for many enthusiasts.
In many cases, though, venues which adapted for digital play during lockdown have chosen to keep it available as an option. Welcoming online players vastly increases their customer base, and can help them fill slots and turn a profit even during quiet periods. What started as an emergency measure during the early days of lockdown is now an innovation that may well be here to stay.
All of this isn’t, of course, to say that lockdown wasn’t a terrible time for the escape game industry. Many venues — even those who did innovate, and innovate brilliantly — simply couldn’t survive the pressures put on them by the barrage of sudden changes.
At the same time, however, there was growth — a burst of creativity prompted by a problem that seemed intractable. In the space of just a few weeks a billion dollar industry totally reinvented itself, rapidly prototyping, developing best practices, and rewriting the rules. The end result (digital escape rooms) might not be perfect, but it is an interesting and a promising solution.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a crisis should prompt creativity in this way, especially in the escape game industry. Makers in this field are, after all, known for thinking outside the box.
Krishan Coupland (website, twitter) is a graduate from the University of East Anglia MA Creative Writing programme. He writes, makes games, runs a small press, and sometimes busks with a typewriter. He has won the Manchester Fiction Prize, and the Bare Fiction Prize. He is unduly preoccupied with service stations.
Image adapted from Jessica Patterson’s “Padlocks” under a CC-BY 2.0 license.