Room Escape Artist

When you include puzzles in an escape room, you playtest those puzzles to ensure they make sense and land well for your intended audience. Similarly, when you include story in an escape room, you can playtest that story to ensure that it makes sense and lands well for your intended audience.

This comparison feels self-evident, yet I suspect that relatively few escape room designers are actually doing it. After all, what does it even mean to “playtest” a story? 

Observe players during the experience, ask them questions afterwards, and iterate to close the gap between what they experienced and what you intended. This positive feedback loop is story playtesting.

The Challenges of Distributed Story

Escape room stories are inherently interactive, which is to say, the potential for narrative meaning progressively emerges relative to players’ roles and interactions. Even when the plot is simple, the way it is communicated is complex, typically distributed across multiple surfaces. These may include traditional storytelling mediums, like a video or an actor’s monologue, as well as more immersive techniques, like environmental storytelling, narratively meaningful actions, or shifts in perception prompted by puzzles.

Escape rooms offer the potential for powerful experiential storytelling, yet many escape rooms remain lightly themed puzzle experiences that don’t try to tell a deeper story, or that try to communicate story more through writing or video rather than through the gameplay and environment.

This leads to a bit of a paradox: the vast majority of escape rooms condition players not to pay close attention to any story, or to expect the story not to completely make sense. Then, the escape rooms that do put more thought into their storytelling are often met by many players who largely disregard their effort.

For the latter, this can be quite disheartening, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. I hope that our industry will continue to shift toward meaningful storytelling over time, through having both more escape rooms prioritize storytelling and more mature player behaviors to match. But in the meantime, we can dig into the elements that are within our control.

Split Focus

Escape rooms are fast-paced, sensory-rich environments in which players are typically propelled forward by a puzzle-fueled sequence of dopamine hits. If you hand me a sheet of paper with lots of words, there’s a lot motivating me to just solve the puzzle with the bolded words and move on, and likely very little motivating me to pay attention to what the paper is actually saying. If I’m in the middle of solving a puzzle and an audio cutscene starts, I’m going to keep solving my puzzle unless the game forces me to stop. Players are conditioned to keep playing, and when their focus is split in too many directions, they’re unlikely to absorb much narrative nuance.

To counteract this, you could switch between “puzzle mode” and “story mode,” making it clear when players should pause their puzzling and exclusively focus on a scene. Dim the lights around the puzzles, or if inputs are digital, turn the puzzles off altogether. Design the game structure such that solving a segment of puzzles triggers a cutscene, and the next batch of puzzles isn’t physically available until that scene ends.

Additionally, strive to tell story more directly through the puzzles, rather than just alongside them. Level up from having puzzle objects that loosely fit the story to having the actions you take with those objects also fit the story. Ensure there’s a clear “why” to each and every interaction, and reinforce that context in the surrounding transitions. Just because you, the designer, knows the “why” doesn’t mean that the players automatically will, too.

Lastly, design your story so that players can interact with it as much or as little as they like. As a baseline, aim that every single player leaves the game being able to provide a clear 1-2 sentence summary of the story. Some players will want to dive deeper, so make sure the “bonus” details are internally consistent without dumping too much excess lore. Other players may just play escape rooms for the puzzles (which is perfectly fine!) so find clear and concise ways to offer those players a “why” for those puzzles.

Let The Story Speak For Itself

There’s a stark difference between intentional room for interpretation and an accidental lack of clarity.

Consider a piece of art hanging in a museum, with a small placard mounted next to it. Ideally, the art speaks for itself, and you can enjoy it fully even before you’ve read the placard. The placard then gives more context for the piece that may deepen your appreciation for it. You learn when it was created, what materials were used, and perhaps some historical or personal context. But in most cases, that supplementary information is just that: supplementary. You are entitled to your own interpretation even after learning more of the artist’s original intentions.

There’s immense value to metadata and artist’s statements, but it’s key to remember that this surrounding documentation is not itself the art, and the art shouldn’t be overly dependent on it.

In an escape room, different players might interpret the same story or scene differently as a result of their personal perspective, or even which puzzles or details they most directly interacted with. This can be a feature, not a bug. A spectrum of meaningful interpretations can mean that your story has depth, resonating with different players in different ways.

Avoid the Quiz

A growing number of escape rooms conclude their game by handing teams a written page explaining the story, or even worse, aggressively quizzing teams to ensure that they understand every small detail of the story exactly how the designer intended.

I have bad news for those games: if you have to resort to these narrative bandaids, you are doing something wrong. The intention is reasonable — getting players to pay closer attention to a story you put a lot of thought and effort into crafting — but this approach is rarely effective, and it may even turn off some players more.

Instead, learn from your players’ responses to these often underdesigned debriefs, and find ways to integrate your learnings back into the core experience. Document every response as meticulously as you would when playtesting your puzzles, notice the patterns, and don’t overfit to any single data point.

The exception, of course, is when such a quiz is already being used as a form of playtesting. If this is your intent, though, we recommend being transparent with players that you welcome their comments and feedback, and being careful not to make them feel like their reactions are “wrong.” You can even allow players to opt in to this form of post-game story debrief, rather than forcing it upon them.

Finally, be okay with the possibility that some players may have a different interpretation of the story you presented. If they find their own cohesive meaning, there’s value in that, too.

Regardless of their complexity, escape rooms center around interactive stories. Details and connections that make perfect sense to you, the designer, don’t automatically also make sense for every player, just like with puzzles. Playtesting your story can help to ensure that every player walks away with clarity around the what and the why of what they just experienced.