The Room Escape Artists Room Turn Down Approach

10 April 2016

1 minute

Water color painting of glasses. A combination lock is secured around the glasses spelling “LOOK!” A second lock is unlocked behind it spelling “SEEK!”

The Room Escape Artist Style

We’ve developed our own style of play. It’s usually effective.* It can also be intimidating to new players.

When we walk into a room, we tear it apart (relax – we don’t break shit). We look, touch, move, and open everything we can find.

We retrace each others’ steps and inspect the items our teammates have already searched.

We move quickly and efficiently. We start shouting things out to each other: anything that is certainly a clue, might be a clue, or even just seems unusual. Everyone should know as much as possible about the room. The puzzles will draw on knowledge of the room.

If we uncover another room later in the game, it all starts again.

All of our regular teammates know this process and a few have special roles within this structure. It’s all completely automatic.

New Room Escape Artists

When we bring new players, this beginning can be overwhelming. It calms down once the room is thoroughly turned over. Then we each focus on individual puzzles.

Know that if we invited you to play, you won’t be out of your element. Dive in! Or watch for the first few minutes and then dive in when you’re ready. Either one works.

*Every so often we encounter a room that doesn’t include enough tangible “stuff” for this method to be effective. Then we change our tactics.

2 responses to “The Room Escape Artists Room Turn Down Approach”

thelogicescapesme

April 12, 2016 at 6:45 am

Interesting. We don’t tend to do that quite so thoroughly. I know we could escape faster if we wanted to, but I like to approach it a bit more organically – assuming the rooms is designed to be escaped from, then we should be fine…

Of course, after playing 50+ escape rooms, we’re not very far away from that approach, but we often get distracted by puzzles early on in a game, so don’t search the room properly at the beginning and it’s not till ten or fifteen minutes in that we do that.

The other thing is that I find detailed searching mentally taxing. I can only do it once or twice in a game. I think if you do the cursory search first then you save that mental energy for when it’s really necessary. That’s one of the things that most annoys me about mis-set rooms – I waste the mental energy on a detailed search and then later in the game I don’t perform such a detailed search of the second room.

Reply
1. David Spira
  
  April 12, 2016 at 11:28 pm
  
  Based on some of our previous conversations I think that the UK games aren’t necessarily as challenging, and serious searching might not be as critical… Same goes game-planning in general.
  
  When we know we’re in an easier room, we are less rigid. Same goes for when we’re in a room that clearly isn’t calling for scavenging.
  
  Reply

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Lisa Spira

Editor-In-Chief at Room Escape Artist: Whether she is editing REA’s content, leading the Hivemind, or wrangling the logistics for RECON or the Escape, Immerse, Explore Tours, Lisa is the reason that everything runs like clockwork. As a linguist and data expert, Lisa also leads our Industry Data efforts and is responsible for our annual Industry Reports. Lisa is the heart of REA and also bakes all of our escakes.

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