Escape room experience

The escape room we went to yesterday was really informative about level layouts and designs for me. I've been to a few escape rooms before and noticed the same things, but escape rooms are built and designed to flow together very well. From one room to another it works very well. The main way i've seen this be done is having something from the previous room needing to be used for the current one. Backtracking into previous rooms to help basically, it's something which a lot of games implement as well, especially in puzzle games.

The different puzzles that are used in escape rooms could be turned into in game puzzles for escape room experiences in game. However something i soon noticed from doing an escape room is that they are very linear in their design. In some games you are given different options which can affect what ending or what path you take within the game. Everything in an escape room is designed to only be done one specific way, there are obviously games like this but it was interesting to see how it was designed after we had finished.

The escape room we did was more based on horror, and it ended up giving me a lot of idea's for actually creating a horror game. Something i loved as we went through it was how small yet big the rooms felt, they weren't that big, but seeing as we'd have to find different items to solve puzzles, it felt bigger than it really was. When things were getting scary with jump scares, it felt claustrophobic despite there being a lot of room to move around in. This gives me the idea to have a escape room like this but based underground or in some sort of cave, as i think it would fit really well with the element of horror, and having to figure out how to escape.

There was a whole operation behind the actual room too, the owner was sat in a control room of sorts, watching us play through it and interacting with us via an iPad. We were also given an iPad in the room too, and could use it to communicate to the "Ghost" who would give us hints on what to do if we got stuck. Once we finished, we went and saw what he could do from his end, which allowed him to activate loud noises and scares in upcoming rooms, as well as messing with the lights. 

He also had a set of camera's to watch us incase anything happened which wasn't meant to, or incase we were touching something that we didn't need to touch. We got to see all of this in real time too, as we were back there watching the other group do another escape room about wizards. Something i never knew about escape rooms was how interactive the people behind it could be, the hint system with the iPads is something I've only ever seen here. In many other escape rooms we have just been given a walkie talkie or something else like that.

There was also just so much detail in each room, little drawings on the wall or blood dripping down surfaces, it really added to the atmosphere and made it feel so much more real despite the size of the rooms.

The first image has the blender and other things on top of the counter, and behind the scenes, the owner on his iPad had the ability to make them all clutter and turn on, creating a loud noise which he could do at anytime, so if we were doing a puzzle and concentrating, he could do it to throw us off. Another thing was how really creative all of the different puzzles were, some were a lot more simple but others were very different from what I've seen before.

These were two of my absolute favorites, the first being shelves which had different skulls of them, and then we had to cover the eyes of certain ones, and this all related to a family tree. The people who had died, we had to cover their eyes.

 The other one was a bunch of different nooses, and when we pulled it, it would play part of a tune, which we had to fully put together to get a key. One of the nooses, we could use to hear the entire melody, then we'd have to pull the different ones to put it all together.

Overall the experience of going to the escape room was really informative and fun, it helped me figure out what i could take from this and maybe put into a game. I'm not sure if escape rooms with multiple paths or choices even exists, since I imagine that kind of defeats the purpose. But i really want to use what i've learnt to create some sort of underground cave escape room, where you'd be trapped from a cave in and need or escape, or you're going to rescue someone else in that situation.