To celebrate reaching Intervirals second blog birthday, we wanted to reach out to other escape room bloggers or websites to collaborate on a guest blog. It took a while to come up with a good question – a question that everyone could contribute their own ideas and opinions on it.
What could be more fun than dreaming up escape rooms?
So the question the blog asked this year was:
If you could design a escape room, what would it be?
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this blog post! And a shoutout to Canadian Caper, who have an upcoming escape room event and which is organised by a couple of escape room bloggers who dared to dream and bring their idea to life.
Enjoy!
Name: David Spira & Lisa Radding, RoomEscapeArtist.com (USA)
If we were to design an escape room, it would be a burglary. Players would first have to break into the room, and steal an object. The puzzles would all involve disabling security systems. Whether they successful steal the object, or fail to do so, an alarm would sound, and the room would lock. The players would then have to break back out. The goal would be to escape without being captured, for a neutral victory, and escape with the stolen object for total victory.
Name: Pá, Lock Me If You Can
Being a sparkly-stuff-fan who also loves puzzles, I miss colourful, cute and shiny rooms – the vast majority of venues tends to build serious or even horror places. I would love to design a “Fairyland Room”, where moving objects and light effects appear like magic. Hidden items in a plastic ball pool and a mountain of colourful stuffed toys would be beside music and smell puzzles. Family friendly, for kids from 8 to 80 who still love fairy tales.
Name: Chris M. Dickson, Exit Games UK
The more I learn about the people who run rooms, the more I am in awe of them and the more I know that I never could do it well. The site I would run, though, would be called Glory Door; you’d enter the game through a door which would remain unlocked throughout in case of fire or panic, but your aim would be to win by finding the final code (or creating the final tool, or…) to open the titular Glory Door itself.
Teams who achieved this in the time limit would walk out through it onto a red carpet where they would be greeted by recorded choirs of angels, indoor fireworks, a spotlight show, a standing ovation from all the staff in the building, an announcement over the tannoy throughout the centre and beyond, a slow-motion close-up video recording of their glorious exit, a tray of glasses of chilled sparking wine and more. To the victor, the spoils!
Name: Eelco, All-EscapeRooms Netherlands
The room would have something to step up the pressure; something like a continuously lowering ceiling. Create an indiana jones mission. Make a combined mission: you have to get in to get a treasure but also get out in time.
Name: BHox, S-capegoats (Singapore)
It would be a truly unique experience! For the players (and for me too of course!). It would be unlike any escape room around now. I might actually just be in the process of doing that…so no spoilers.
Name: Mike, Escape Games Review (Canada)
I think the Holy Grail right now is the Replayable Room (especially for players like us, who have run out of rooms). I would love to create/play a room that is the “Chrono Trigger” equivalent of escape rooms (multiple endings, bonuses for continuing a previous game, etc). Combining the best uses of tech and actor elements you could really create an awesomely immersive world.
Names: Paula and Alan, Escape Room Hunters (Australia)
We really enjoy super-immersive experiences so if we designed a room, we would want it to be all encompassing. We like the idea of a space station theme where the room slowly rotates to give a sense of motion and disorientation that being in orbit would provide. Windows would gaze into the inky blackness of space, while others would show the Earth whizzing past the windows as you’re tumbling closer to the surface, needing to get to the escape pod.
Name: Joshua, Escman League (Malaysia)
We’re time travelling agents trying to solve a murder case a century ago, but we only have 60 minutes before the time travelling law enforcement catch up to us. There will be multiple rooms with the time travelling machine in the middle, transporting us to different eras by entering the correct date and time we need to go (which we get from each room). We could escape successfully, but we still need to solve the murder case.
Name: Mark, re-named to ReallyFun (United Kingdom)
Design: I’d want to design a room that fixes all the little things that grate on me. The first thing would be coming up with a brief that gives people a flavour of what the room’s about, but doesn’t tell them the full story. Then something in the room would explain more, possibly with a twist. Everybody loves a twist!
Name: J., Escaping SG (Singapore)
I really enjoy rooms with a ‘metapuzzle’ structure, as well as those with a driving narrative, so I’d love to try designing a room with both those aspects. Perhaps a murder mystery, in which certain first-level puzzles yield clues that contribute towards eventually finding the culprit? Or maybe something more high-tech, like a science-fiction thriller in which you break through layers of security and pick up clues about the final code — and some great plot revelation — en route.
Name: Essa, Intervirals
I would design an elevator escape room, not an 100% original idea as I know of one that already exists out there, somewhere in Canada. Have watched too many movies where the protagonist is in an elevator, then it suddenly stops several stories above the ground. Would involve ominous creaking sounds and a way to escape by unlocking the hatch on the elevator’s ceiling, then finding a nearby floor and searching for a way to open that floor’s elevator doors. 😀
So, if you could design an escape room – what would be in it? 🙂
Essa 🙂
Intervirals 