Constraints lead to creativity.

When the world shut down in March 2020, escape room creators all around the world were forced to discover new ways to share their experiential art from afar and keep their businesses afloat. What resulted were hundreds, if not thousands, of online escape rooms that experimented with new formats and new technology, and which were accessible to players anywhere. Some of these games were scrappy approximations of an in-person escape room; others were polished masterpieces that were only possible in this new format.

By most counts, the heyday of online escape rooms has passed. The REA Hivemind went from reviewing over a hundred live-hosted online escape rooms in 2020 and 2021 to a mere handful in the subsequent years. TERPECA also eliminated the Top Online Rooms category back in 2022.

Many — but not all — of our favorite live experiences in this genre now exist only in our memories.

Of note, Headlocked Escape Rooms will stop running their Golden Lock Award-winning games at the end of August 2024. So if you haven’t played The Keeper & the Fungus Among Us or Rise of the Fungi (the newer prequel!), book them today!

Even though we may no longer have to play online escape rooms, there are a number of reasons why we may still want to. There is much to be learned from the evolution of online escape rooms over the past 4 years, and I believe that many such experiences will continue to provide unique value in the right contexts and for the right audiences.

A Taxonomy of Online Escape Rooms

Online escape rooms span multiple different formats. Some games attempt to reproduce something close to a real-life escape room experience while others lean into other types of puzzle-driven gameplay. Some are hosted by a live in-character host (often referred to as an “avatar”) who is physically present on an escape room set. Other games are playable on-demand without any live human facilitation.

Most online escape rooms fit into the following categories. I’ve linked one example in each.

	Hosted	Unhosted
Adaptation of an existing physical escape room	Emergency Exit’s The Beast	Next Level Escape’s Temporal Tangle
Newly created physical escape room	Omescape’s Pursuit of the Assassin Artist	Marvo Mysteries’ M.A.R.V.O Archives
Newly created digital escape room	Meridian Adventure Co’s The Traveler’s Guide to Little Sodaburg	Wolf Escape Rooms’ Hallows Hill
Newly created audio escape room	Trapped Puzzle Rooms’ Audio Escape Adventures	Rusty Lake Untold: The Lab

Some of these newer styles necessitated the development of more refined supporting tech. Buzzshot, an existing escape room software platform, created Telescape, which started as a streamlined inventory system but soon became a fully-fledged virtual escape room engine utilized by a majority of the top experiences in this era.

Some other related categories of at-home escape rooms also grew rapidly during the pandemic:

• Print-and-play escape and puzzle games
• Tabletop escape rooms and puzzletales
• Escape puzzle books

Additionally, there was a spike in demand for the more established genre of puzzle video games, and a continued rise of both standard point-and-click escape rooms as well as virtual reality escape rooms.

Why Play Online Escape Rooms?

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was one very obvious reason why many of us resorted to playing or creating online escape rooms: because it was simply not possible to play escape rooms in person.

But along the way, we discovered some additional benefits to online escape rooms, both as players and creators.

Playing with far-off friends

During quarantine, online escape rooms enabled us to connect with friends from afar. But even as many of us began to freely travel again, online escape rooms continue to provide creative options for collaborative play with friends who we don’t get to see regularly in-person.

Convenience

Maybe you don’t have time to travel, you’ve run out of local escape rooms, you don’t feel like leaving your house, or you have young children and no babysitter. Online escape rooms provide nearly instantaneous access to a wide range of options.

Virtual tourism

From the comfort of our homes, we had access to escape rooms in dozens of countries around the world during the 2020-2022 peak of online escape rooms. This level of cultural exchange in the escape room world was unprecedented, even for enthusiasts who travel regularly for escape rooms. I personally played games based in the US, Canada, England, Ukraine, Malta, Switzerland, Cyprus, Brazil, Poland, Japan, France, Croatia, Greece, and Australia.

Interactions not possible IRL

Live avatar escape rooms have included a range of novel interactions and aesthetics that are not feasible in in-person escape rooms. This sort of magic included real-time camera trickery, hidden assistants, seamlessly interwoven cutscenes, destructive actions, and stunt performances.

Rapid prototyping and iteration

An in-person escape room needs to be built to withstand the prying hands of thousands of players. With online escape rooms, elements of the set and interactivity can be faked — after all, they only need to look real on camera — making it easier to quickly spin up and make changes to new games.

Intimate avatar interaction

In many online escape rooms, a live avatar served as the players’ eyes, ears, and hands in a physical environment. The most compelling experiences typically cast this avatar as a memorable character rather than just a neutral facilitator of gameplay. We the players were there to assist this character from afar, whether providing intel to our ground agent in a spy mission, comforting someone through a terrifying situation, or helping a hungover fool navigate a disorienting morning. This relationship was meaningfully different from the ways in which players generally interact with actors in in-person escape rooms.

Looking Forward

Online escape rooms may never return to their position of prominence in 2020-2021, barring another global disaster. Yet, they’re not going away fully.

The best online escape rooms didn’t try to reproduce the top features of in-person escape rooms. Rather, they took advantages of the unique strengths of the virtual medium. They facilitated meaningful remote communication and collaboration beyond what’s possible on a normal video call. This in turn became its own new genre, offering different creative directions for escape rooms from what is feasible in person.

While the pandemic kept us apart, it also allowed us to become closer with far-off friends in brand new ways.

The pandemic is not yet over for many people, and not all escape rooms are physically accessible to all players in their usual formats. Online escape rooms massively broaden the accessibility of games around the world for a range of cases.

Virtual teambuilding took off exponentially during the pandemic. Countless companies hired remote employees over the pandemic, and with many teams still remotely distributed, this continues to be an important market for virtual escape rooms.

We also encountered examples of using an unhosted adaptation of in-person escape rooms as a way to archive a game before it’s retired, as in the case with Escape Room LA’s The Haunted Theatre and Next Level Escape’s Temporal Tangle. At Room Escape Artist, we keep our content as spoiler-free as possible, but if you’re interested in going more in-depth into escape room design, spoilers and all, join the Room Escape Artist Patreon to gain access to our Spoilers Club podcast.

Finally, online escape rooms allow us to support escape room communities from afar when it’s needed most. One of the Hivemind’s favorite experiences, Project Avatar, managed to keep running their signature experience along with some additional online escape rooms throughout the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Recently in Brazil, residents of Rio Grande do Sul suffered from terrible flooding, and the local community put together a listing of available online escape rooms in the region.

The pandemic brought us much hardship, but it also prompted the creation of new escape room genres. We’ve witnessed truly remarkable levels of resilience and innovation across a range of styles and mediums. Even as we’ve returned fully to playing escape rooms in person, I can’t help but marvel at the enduring qualities — creative, business, and community-centric — of the online escape room era.