Instructions: Label pieces of a “key”, Hide them in a room, Ask the players to find the key, Ask the players to piece the key together
I came up with this idea when I was playing some escape room games on my phone. I am a huge escape room fan, and I’ve experienced a variety of them. I think the fun of participating in an escape room comes in form of solving creative puzzles, interacting with interesting mechanisms, and sometimes enjoy partially immersing in a story. However, recently, there is a trend of escape room games that focus a lot more on quantity than quality. By that I mean rooms are designed to be small and puzzles are designed to be extremely easy to solve, and basically the only part that requires the players to think is to find specific objects to place, and the placements and use of the objects are extremely obvious. Those games are designed to insert ads between each room to gain profit. I think those games completely defeat the parts that are fun of escape rooms. I came up with this idea to create a game that is an exaggeration of such type of design. It intervenes how regular escape rooms are being played because it takes a lot more people to play this version of the game, and the focus of the game shifts from solving puzzle to just finding the pieces of the puzzle. I decided to include more players because I liked the ideas in the institute to give the players a different experience to this “escape room”, and more people contributing to the chaos of the gameplay partially benefits me because the inherent chaos makes the game more difficult and fun. In the end, both runs of the game went really well, each with its own surprises. The first time having an NPC and having the pieces at unexpecting places really amplified the surprise element, and the second time with expectations of where I could hide things the players still had trouble finding all the pieces in a short time, albeit the first few pieces were discovered much faster. Overall I think the intervention was pretty successful, the game was played how I intended for it to be played and the players had fun.
