You’re locked in a room and find a puzzle about cooking ingredients. That’s great because you’re a professional chef with a PhD in nutrition. You’ve forgotten more about food than most people learn in a lifetime. You’re going to rock this puzzle.
Stop. Let someone else on your team handle this element of the game.
What’s really about to happen if you go any further is you’re going to overthink the hell out of this puzzle. You know too much. Way too much. You almost certainly know far more about this particular field of knowledge than the game designer who thought that food ingredients could add a nice theme to their logic and deduction puzzle.
They don’t know the biochemistry, or the specialized classifications, or strange patterns you’re about to pickup on.
Room escapes almost never require specialized outside knowledge; especially high-level knowledge.
If you’re a computer scientist, that alphanumeric pattern that you just noticed isn’t assembly code. It’s a pattern that you need to parse and possibly decode with something else in the room.
One of the easiest ways to overthink a puzzle is to apply excessive outside experience to it. Don’t do that.
Reason your way out of the room; don’t overthink yourself into a hole.
The outside knowledge trap is one specific trap to avoid. For more tips, checkout our Player Tips section.
