Room Escape Artist

During a REA Patreon Discord discussion sparked by my previous post about Designing Escape Rooms Around Game Mechanics, Nick Moran posited a thought that has stuck with me. He said simply, “Format Is Experience.” I took that to mean the format your product takes when delivered to the customer is the experience, or at least a big part of it. The claim might be deliberately provocative, but the more I thought about it, the more I found it holding up.

Readers of Room Escape Artist know everything is a designable surface. Possibly no surface has more potential to influence the player than the format of your experience. If format is experience, then a game delivered in the same format as everyone else’s ends up feeling like everyone else’s. As we look to move away from so many escape rooms feeling the same, creators should examine how the format of what they produce influences the player experience, and experiment with formats that stand out.

Format vs. Game Mechanic

It can be tricky to separate the ideas of a game’s format from its mechanics. 

Game mechanics are the systems and rules that govern how players interact with the content itself once they’re inside. Mechanics explain exactly how players can overcome gates to make progress towards their goal. Mechanics are what players do moment to moment.

Format sets the conditions under which something is experienced. Think of it as the container the experience is delivered in. It’s decided before players ever walk in, and it’s a business and operations choice as much as a design one. It is the way in which the game content is presented to the players. 

Format answers “what kind of experience did I sign up for?” before you start; mechanic answers “how do I make progress?” once you’re inside.

Formats At Work

Examples help me think through ideas like this. The further an experience strays from the standard, the easier its format is to spot, but the same levers of change exist inside a normal escape room. So even non-traditional experiences can help spur inspiration. 

The first to come to mind is Phantom Peak in London, an open-world sandbox experience full of trails to pursue and townsfolk to meet, all guided by the in-world Jonassist app. It is really fun! Then there’s ChamCorp from The Chamber in Prague (review coming soon), a similar model but one in which the actors handle the quest assignment and update the load-balancing app behind the scenes, leaving the players free to roam tech-free. The mechanics are basically the same but this modest format change makes a huge difference. Different format, different experience.

Magnifico at Escaparium in Montreal is a 2.5-hour escape room with multiple actors in elaborate costumes. Its higher-throughput pipelined format makes it more economically viable. Masquerade in New York City moves its audience through in pulses, reusing spaces as it goes. This achieves the same goal at an even bigger scale. It is possible that neither of these would even exist without the careful examination and implementation of their specific formats, even though most customers never notice them. Here, format is the experience because without the format there is no experience.

The Krugger’s Secret at Insomnia Corporation in Spain (review coming soon) is an overnight horror adventure in three very different acts where players interact with a wide range of characters. Meanwhile, The Sherlock Home in San Antonio is an overnight stay full of sleuthing and discovery without ever seeing even another person. Two overnight formats that produce opposite experiences, one social and theatrical, one solitary and puzzley. Same length, same bedtime, different experiences, because ‘overnight’ was only one of the format choices.

Kingdom Come from The Chamber in Prague (review coming soon) is a large group game where individual smaller teams traverse past each other in a real medieval castle. Teams meet characters, solve puzzles, and complete activities in a round-robin style format, which must have taken enormous planning and practice to perfect. The feeling of a living castle, glimpsing other teams mid-adventure, and then assembling together for dramatic moments was the experience.

THE ENDings from Strange Bird Immersive in Houston used a structure that allowed each guest to have an individual experience amongst a crowd of people. We roamed the space and performed weird tasks, with a pair of headphones acting as armor to protect us against worrying about what other people thought of us. Format again served the pipeline, but it offered more. It provided a private path and a singular experience while hosting hundreds of people.

A more normal escape room example can be found at The Ministry of Peculiarities in Southern California where their outside-the-doors magic circle threshold stands in contrast to most other companies. That one decision changes how every minute after it feels. So does their commitment to making players feel seen. Neither is a puzzle or a set piece or a game mechanic. Both are format choices made before anyone walks through the door. 

Even tabletop is an adjacent format type with innovation potential worth mentioning. PostCurious is delivering wonderful products in a format they call puzzletales. A blend of board games, escape rooms, and interactive fiction.

Smaller Bites

Format innovation doesn’t require a castle. Meaningful format choices can be bite-sized, touching only a single aspect of the game. A cold start or the grand game intros that happen at Escaparium’s immersive bar/ lobby FUBAR are both format decisions that matter. Tales of Torchdale’s Monster Mashers in Belgium drives home the power of a daring format experiment with an unforgettable sequence that makes designers reconsider what is possible with the environment that is already available to them. 

Great Gold Bird is a “wanderplay” by Twin Alchemy. Strange Bird Immersive is presenting it in Houston, and it has some escape room vibes. It takes place over several locations with travel time required in between. This slower-paced show led us to explore beautiful places and emotional spaces. That time in transit was critical. It provided the opportunity to process, to discuss, and to feel all the feels. It just wouldn’t have been the same in a different format.

Escape Artist Greenville linked its three escape rooms at their Hampton Station location to create the Chimera Corp Saga, complete with carefully designed and tested intergame scenes. That format shift helped carry the experience to the top of the US market according to TERPECA.  

The immersive show The Willows in Southern California invisibly sorts guests into cohorts based on where they choose to sit at dinner. It is a masterful format choice. The performance craft of remembering names and details about audience members to use later in callbacks is a predetermined format choice. Those details help make the experience what it is.

Taking incremental steps to include actors in your escape rooms or to elevate their theatricality beyond a jump-scare menace are decisions about format that can have incredible impact on player perception.

Format Risk

There are risks with format innovation. A standard escape room format emerged early on which spread far and wide. This standard helps set customer expectations, and there’s something to be said for clear expectations. 

Format changes, maybe even more so than mechanics, add risk, because of how they touch that “what are we signing up for” part of the booking process. There are tradeoffs. Being different adds excitement, but what works for one company, city, or game style won’t be a universally fun design or good business decision.

Doors of Divergence, with its unique choice-based format model that drastically changes players’ Madness: 1917 experience with each new visit, is a wonder to witness when performing at its peak. The characters, story, puzzles, interactions, and even costumes all depend on previous decisions made by your group. But that format makes operating these games a heavier lift. A Charlotte-based reboot under new ownership announced its closing just months after opening, and a recent visit found it struggling to deliver on the full potential of the complex format that was once on display in New York City. An ambitious format is a big bet. If you can’t run it the way customers expect, the format that set you apart becomes the thing that sinks you.

Be The Change

There is a lot of sameness in the escape room industry, especially in the US market. The script is familiar: Show up 15 minutes early with a team of two to eight. Sit through a memorized rules speech. Race a 60-minute timer while a gamemaster watches on camera and hints appear on a screen. Pose for a photo with a sign. Every one of those is a format choice. Different format choices are a way to set your work apart.

Subverting expectations from time to time is a goal that a clever format can help deliver on. A simple thing like ensuring the last person into a space gets to be the first person to enter a new space or witness a reveal can be just enough to elevate the enjoyment for some players. 

At Room Escape Artist, we talk a lot about the player experience. How does it feel to interact with a product? How does it feel to interact with your product? Does it feel the same as everyone else’s?

I urge creators, as with game mechanics, to imagine format possibilities through the lens of the player experience. Whether it is a large-scale choice or a smaller game moment, the format in which the content is delivered to the audience is important. And if your format looks like everyone else’s, your experience will too. 

Format is always part of the experience, and sometimes it really is the experience.

Editor’s Note: If you’re here at the end of this article, you are thinking deeply about this industry. You belong to our community. For more about topics such as this one, support us on Patreon and join our Patreon Discord conversation. And for those of you who are already supporters, thank you!