Room Escape Artist

While escape rooms should always set their players up for success, failure is also an integral part of any immersive, puzzle-driven experience.

When thoughtfully designed, failure — as well as the potential for failure — can raise the stakes and make eventual success all the more satisfying. When designed poorly, failing can feel overly frustrating and dissatisfying, potentially overshadowing the successes.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how escape rooms can make failure fun, fair, and meaningful, as well as how forced failure can be a powerful game mechanic.

Challenging But Fair

The easiest puzzle to design is an impossible puzzle that nobody can solve. 

“Unfair” is not a fun flavor of difficulty. For a puzzle to be satisfying, it must present a challenge but also give players a reasonable chance at unassisted success. The more you increase the difficulty, the more you must proportionately scale the final payoff.

Unclear clues, random leaps of logic, and ambiguous answers are unfair. Red herrings and unnecessary noise are inelegant. Providing insufficient time to solve a puzzle and then making the players feel bad for failing is just mean.

When a player can’t solve a puzzle, they should be able to look back at it and think “I could have solved that” rather than “I never would have gotten that.” Upon seeing the solution, the puzzle should still feel satisfying, not arbitrary or cruel.

Low escape rates don’t automatically make for a better escape room, nor does a more “difficult” game mean it’s a better game if that difficulty stems from unfairness. You could stubbornly refuse to give players a hint on a puzzle that almost all teams need a hint on (and which thus probably should be revised.) Or you could create 90 minutes of content, call it a 60-minute game, and brag about having a 0% success rate, but that’s poor experience design. One exception is a game that is specifically designed to be replayable, with multiple sessions worth of content or different branches to explore, and that only works if you set clear expectations for the players ahead of time.

As many escape rooms are finding creative ways to adapt their experiences to a range of abilities and tell a complete story every time, low escape rates increasingly correlate with a lack of care for the player experience.

This isn’t to say that we should never let teams fail, either in individual puzzles or in the overall experience, but we must be thoughtful around how and why they fail, and what the consequences are.

Land The Ending

The most underdesigned part of the vast majority of escape rooms is the ending.

When teams succeed, they might get a final action sequence or a cool effect. But when they fail, the ending almost always happens out of frame, with a game host entering the room to announce “sorry, you’re out of time!” This instantly shatters the immersion, as well as any belief in the realness of the stakes.

Meaningful stakes equals meaningful failure.

One solution to this is to design multiple endings, including a separate ending sequence which implements the narrative consequences of failing to complete your mission in time. If the bomb is supposed to go off, then have the game end with a bang. You fail to escape the speakeasy, so you’re chased out by the coppers. Or maybe the “failure ending” is more positive. You didn’t find your grandma’s cat in time, yet she shows up with a plate of cookies to help you feel better. In any of these cases, make sure that the failure ending is as exciting and fun as the success ending, so that players still end their experience on a positive note.

In some games, the ending happens before the time even runs out, with some sort of “instant fail” scenario. You still have 20 minutes left on the clock, but you get captured by the menace or cut the wrong wire of the bomb, and you fail abruptly. While these are examples of meaningful stakes, they almost always lead to players feeling powerless and ending their experience on a negative note. As such, we generally advise against this design pattern.

Alternatively, offer a multi-tiered win condition. If you finish an easily accomplishable core objective, then you get the good ending. If you complete additional, trickier side objectives, then you get even better endings.

Or simply don’t let teams fail. Hinting and adaptive difficulty, in addition to flexible time slots, can help ensure that every team is able to get the full experience and see the in-world success ending.

Don’t Hide Cool Stuff Behind Failure

On the flip side, it’s important that teams don’t get a lesser experience when they play “too well” and don’t fail as much. This shouldn’t be left up to the players; a well-designed escape room adapts to all play styles and abilities.

Hint systems are a common example of this principle. Suppose an escape room includes a creative way of delivering hints: an interactive character, a magical well, hand-delivered notes, or even just a game host who has a knack for comedy. These all make failure more fun for teams who need hints, but the teams who don’t need hints often don’t get to experience these features at all. Of the latter, it’s likely that only a handful of enthusiasts will ever think to ask to see how a hint system works after their game is over, and even then, it’s not the same as seeing it in context.

How do we fix this? Design fun hint systems that are also part of the core gameplay, so that all players get to experience them. This is doubly positive: it ensures that more players get to see a cool feature that you spent time developing, and it might help to make hints feel more integrated into the experience and less like hints.

For example, in Dream Labs’ The Tale of the Heartless Pirate in Bad Steben, Germany, a metal animatronic talking parrot serves both as museum tour guide and hint system, delivering a wealth of quippy descriptions and Easter eggs for all players, and also sneaking a bit of extra intel for teams who need it. In Locurio’s The Storykeeper in Seattle, Washington, a core mechanism for delivering story calibrates how much detail it provides to players’ progress, invisibly making hints a natural part of the storytelling.

Forced Failure

This principle also applies on a more structural level for certain experiences with core mechanics centered around failure.

As David noted in his review of Immersia’s Project R.E.S.E.T., “it is possible to play Project R.E.S.E.T. too well and miss out on some of the magic.” I absolutely loved this game, but unfortunately my team puzzled too precisely to see Immersia’s brilliance in full force. My experienced team ran into a similar issue while playing Bridge Command in London. We played too efficiently, didn’t let anything break, and consequently spent the entire game seated and staring at screens, rather than having fun running around the gorgeous spaceship set to physically fix things.

In both these cases, there’s an easy fix: forced failure. If players don’t fail on their own, seamlessly ensure that they fail regardless of skill level so that they can experience the more interesting path. This doesn’t mean you need to make players feel bad or like they did anything wrong; just weave it into the narrative. Only by following a dead end and failing do you learn some key information that you can use on your next iteration. Or your ship gets hit by an asteroid so powerful that nothing in your control could have prevented the damage.

A great example is SCRAP’s (now closed) The Pop Star’s Room of Doom, which implemented a “time loop” mechanic where it was literally impossible to succeed without repeatedly resetting, no matter how effective you were at puzzle solving. You learned new things each loop, and certain key information could only be learned by failing, which inherently took full advantage of the game’s core mechanic.

Other escape rooms effectively use failure more for emotional impact. Ukiyo’s Deep Space presented a number of morally ambiguous scenarios with meaningful consequences. In my review, I noted: “Through forced failure and actual failure alike, we sometimes did the wrong thing, something bad happened as a result, and we had to live with it. On the flip side, sometimes we did the right thing, helped someone, and felt all the better for it. Our wins felt extra well earned, and there was a refreshing depth of ethical interactivity throughout.”

Forced failure is a powerful technique, and some of the best escape rooms in the world utilize it to great effect. Use it sparingly and intentionally; like a magic trick, if you repeat it too many times, players may see through the illusion and feel like they were unfairly deceived.

Succeeding At Failure

Whether making sure that your players don’t feel like they’ve been unfairly tricked, implementing more meaningful in-world stakes for failure, or integrating failure-specific features into the core gameplay, it’s essential to treat all types of failure as designable surfaces, not just accidental edge cases.

When we succeed at meaningful failure, we can increase player agency and better ensure that every player leaves feeling like a winner, regardless of their intermediate wins and losses.