Category: Video Games

In advance of our upcoming panel discussion on room escapes at PAX West, we spoke with each of the panelists about their experiences as gamers, perspectives on room escapes, and future evolution of their games.

In this interview, we talk to Edwin Tsui of The Locked Room (Calgary, AB) about his experience as a game enthusiast and game creator/owner.

Room Escape Artist: How did your enthusiasm for escape rooms turn into a business?

Edwin: When my girlfriend and I first heard of the concept of the escape room, it sounded like an amazingly fun activity. After we played our very first escape rooms in Prague in early 2014, we knew it was fun, and we wanted to bring the activity back to our home city of Calgary.

I met with my two future business partners, Kyle and Adil, while offering them DJ service for their zombie-themed fun run. At the end of our meeting, I casually brought up the escape room idea, which intrigued them. From there, we launched our first two-room facility as a market tester and things just took off.

Your background and interests are in video games and puzzling. Tell us how video games have influenced your escape room business.

My favorite types of video games are RPG and strategy games. Well-crafted games of those genres tend to have good flow, and give players a sense of accomplishment as they progress through the game.

I want players coming through our escape rooms to feel like they have that sense of progression, with a mixture of some easy wins, and some tougher battles. This is accomplished by having a combination of puzzles and activities – some of which are straightforward and intuitive, and others that may require a bit of head scratching before the ‘aha’ light bulb switches on with the correct answer.

It’s important to listen to the players who come through and use their feedback to make improvements and changes. This goes for the games themselves, as well as marketing, customer service, and market conditions, which are equally important as the content in the escape rooms themselves. We always want to ensure that the fun factor is maximized and the frustration factor minimized. Visiting gamefaqs.com (in the olden days of the internet!) to find a walkthrough or tip for a certain boss or game sequence always felt like ‘giving up’!

You’ve played many escape rooms all over the world, but your business partners haven’t played as many escape rooms themselves. How do your design interests align with or differ from those of your business partners?

Part of playing more games is that quality expectations as a player are always increasing. I’m always comparing the puzzles, immersion and overall fun factor of each new room to pre-existing experiences (and also to my own offerings!).

When designing my own escape room games, it’s important to understand my market and to offer puzzles and activities that will be appropriate for that particular demographic (newer players vs. corporate team builders vs. puzzle hunt specialists). What may seem fun or intuitive to me after playing 100 games may be too difficult or non-intuitive for a first-time player. Thus, my partners do a great job of keeping me grounded and finding that balance of challenging, yet fun (without being frustrating), for our target demographic.

As a player, your favorite games cater to enthusiasts. How do you keep the gamer/enthusiast market happy while still executing on a viable business model?

The beauty of the escape room as an activity is that it’s accessible to a wide range of players; there is no steep learning curve, no inherent safety issue (generally), and everybody can share in the fun and adrenaline of the experience.

Gamers and/or puzzlers will have an inherent advantage because of the style of challenges in most escape rooms, but a player with 5-10 escape room games under their belt will already be on par or better at these real-life games than a brand new (but with games/puzzle experience) player.

We try to offer a wide variety of themes and difficulty levels so that everybody has a chance to find the right fit for themselves. Not everybody is going to love every game that they play, but it is our responsibility to provide as much information as possible so that we can manage player expectations heading into an escape room game.

When you started, you wanted to expose your audience to those awesome moments you had first encountered in escape rooms. How do you evolve so that you can continue to produce that wow moment?

There are many ways to achieve the ‘wow’ moments in a game, but as players become more experienced, it takes a bit more thought to find new ways to surprise them! Some of my personal favorites are clever use of ordinary everyday items in MacGyver ways  or hidden objects (or passageways) concealed right under the players’ noses!

Electronics and technology are also useful tools for creating ‘wow’ puzzle components and, when used appropriately, can help bridge the gap between what can be achieved in real life and what is possible in video games.

In advance of our upcoming panel discussion on room escapes at PAX West, we spoke with each of the panelists about their experiences as gamers, perspectives on room escapes, and future evolution of their games.

In this interview, we talk to Puzzle Break’s Nate Martin, an avid video gamer and PAX enthusiast, about the new games he is developing aboard cruise ships.

Room Escape Artist: There is a panel on escape rooms at the upcoming PAX West in Seattle! How did this come about? And why does it belong?

Nate: PAX West is a conference/festival that grew out of the Penny Arcade comedy and game webcomic. Seattle’s PAX (formerly “Prime”, now “West”) is a full-blown cultural phenomenon celebrating all things gaming. Puzzle Break, the first contemporary US-based room escape company, was founded in Seattle, the home of Penny Arcade and PAX West. I’ve been a fan since the beginning. Giving a talk at PAX and being an ambassador for the industry to the greater gaming community has always been in the back of my head and the escape room industry has now matured enough to introduce it at PAX.

Live-action room escapes are, in many ways, the literal physical embodiment of a video game. Escape room experiences combine the core elements of a genre of video game with real-life elements to provide a gaming experience that is indescribably fun. That’s what PAX is all about.

When I reached out to the organizers, I decided to pitch the idea as a panel discussion. I’ve assembled a diverse selection of industry leaders who will share different perspectives and ensure some great discussion.

You’ve always been a gamer, but your escape room designs lean harder on puzzles. How do we see the gaming influence in your puzzle-focused escape rooms?

I was more or less raised by the Adventure/Point-and-Click genre of video games. The lion’s share of those games were hard. Conquering them was often a significant challenge (especially before the Internet was tremendously ubiquitous), but it felt so good. My co-founder Dr. Lindsay Morse and I feel strongly that it is far more entertaining and satisfying to encounter and hopefully overcome a tough challenge than breeze through a cakewalk.

However, we are extremely cognizant of a tremendously important distinction: There’s a fine line between challenging and unfair. People often forget that many if not most of the best adventure games (Myst, Grim Fandango, etc.) had their fair share of puzzles that were simply too hard or esoteric to be fair. At Puzzle Break, we love throwing challenges at our players, but they must always fall squarely in the “fair” category.

You’ve now taken this concept aboard cruise ships. How do you have to change your approach to design for the cruise ship games?

In many ways, not very much! Royal Caribbean has a seasoned entertainment staff who have a close handle on what their guests want. We’ve had countless discussions with their creative folks on how we might modify our design methodologies to better suit their customers’ desires. In the end, we changed surprisingly little from a design perspective. 

One of the biggest draws of the room escape experience on a cruise is making new friends, so we definitely included a healthy amount of content that requires close teamwork. However, we also made sure to have elements for folks who want to work on stuff by themselves.

What are the technical challenges to operating multiple games in multiple locations on the different ships?

The challenges are simultaneously enormously easy and stupendously tricky. Most of the general operational challenges are nothing a massive cruise line doesn’t deal with 1000 times before breakfast. We put together a reference for everything the Royal Caribbean staff could possibly need to setup, run, and maintain the games, and they do it with comparatively few issues.

The real problems are arising with our new Escape the Rubicon room. I’ve famously claimed this is the most technically advanced room escape in existence in many ways, and I wasn’t kidding. We partnered with ShowFX, a stupendously experienced fabrication firm, to create a stunningly beautiful and diabolically complex interactive experience. Maintaining the room’s electronics and mechanics is uncharted territory and we’re figuring out best practices as we go. It ain’t easy.

We’ve recently seen photos of the new room you’ve developed for a cruise ship: Escape the Rubicon. It looks like you’ve really taken design up a notch. What are the challenges to bring that level of design to your Seattle and Long Island locations?

With Escape the Rubicon, we wanted to create a truly blockbuster-quality experience. Our design methodologies may not have changed very much, but through the partnership with Royal Caribbean we now had the resources to craft a Hollywood-caliber set and use professional actors to tell a story with next-level immersion.

The two biggest jumps in Rubicon were budget and technology.

Puzzle Break is entirely self-funded. As we grow, we put a ton of resources right back into R&D for new rooms and interactive experiences. Each progressive room we make is an evolutionary leap in fit & finish. Additionally, with every project we complete, our team learns more and more about embedded technology and systems. We are continuing to work to elevate the technology, design, and polish in all Puzzle Break games.