UPDATING OUR ESCAPE ROOMS
here at Clue Chase, we get asked a lot of questions. Questions like “Why?” and “How did you possibly come up with this?” and “Who hurt you?”. Among those very real questions will often come another one: “Hey, we’ve played all four of your available rooms. When will you guys make a new one?” . This questions has a very un-fun answer, which is “Probably not for a long time”.
That’s not fully the case today. But we’ll get into that more later. For now, we’ll answer “Why don’t you make new rooms every year/every few months/right now?”
Put simply – modern escape rooms, at the level of quality we hold ourselves to, are extremely complicated, time consuming, and expensive to both build and to operate. Gone are the days (at least in NYC) where you could build a rudimentary set (or just, paint a room) fill it with some padlocks, and call it a day. Modern escape rooms need to give players something they haven’t already experienced – and a lot of people have played a lot of escape rooms, at this point. So new rooms need to have custom technology, unique and challenging puzzle designs, and a visually interesting setting.
As everyone who has ever used a printer before knows, technology can be a fickle friend, custom built technology even more so. Essentially each escape room now needs to function as its own miniature smart home, complete with remotely controllable lights, locks, doors, screens, motors, speakers – just about anything that does more than just sitting inanimate in the room needs to be remotely controllable, reliably, by our game masters. Designing, coding, rigging and testing all of these components is a specialized and time consuming task, that is absolutely essential to the end experience for both our players and our staff.
Coming up with new logic puzzles, or at least interesting twists on old ideas is also an immensely time consuming task. Puzzles need to be very deliberate in their design, so that their logic is cohesive and whole, ideally every single puzzle can be solved without a single piece of external guidance. And we have had groups complete all of our rooms without any hints at all. (This is exceedingly rare, and unless you are very, very confident in your skills, we don’t really recommend going down the “no clue” route). The challenge comes with designing something with clear logic that, once understood, can be easily followed and explained – while also obfuscating what that logic is, so that the puzzle is not simply a series of basic steps one must undertake. For example “We have a two swords. One is long, one is short, and we have two sheaths of different lengths. One long, one short.” is not a good puzzle. That’s an activity, where you put swords into sheaths of the same corresponding lengths. We’ve played escape rooms that have “puzzles” like this throughout most of the game. On the other hand, a good puzzle may involve two color sequences of three colors each, and a secondary area wherein each one of those colors alone is associated with three numbers. I won’t go into more details less I spoil a real puzzle – but players working out the relationship between the provided color and number sequences is far more interesting and obfuscated than comparing sword lengths. Even though in the end, they both ultimately come down to properly matching categories together based on visible information. This may not be a particularly clear paragraph, it turns out writing about puzzles that are entirely visual and tactile without spoiling them is a bit difficult. Alas.
Lastly the sets – everyone who has every watched a movie, TV or professional stage show has seen what good sets look like. We all have a broad frame of reference. Our goal is to match or exceed the quality of something you might see in a Broadway theater. This means bringing in professional carpenters, scenic designers and set decorators in order to build out our interactive play-spaces. The building process alone can take several months, from laying out the first framework to finishing the final paint touches and placing the final props.
In short – we don’t have new games on a yearly basis because then we would never be open – just caught in a constant loop of updating and retiring old rooms. (Which might be fun for us, we love building games, it’s why we do what we do. But the building process is… not profitable. And we are a business after all). We know that’s not an exciting answer, but it just comes down to finances and logistics. The two most adult reasons for not being able to do fun things the world has ever seen.
That all said – we’re updating one of our rooms. (Way to bury the headline, us). This process won’t be immediate – in fact it may not be done until the late spring, or early summer. Which is part of why we’re burying that bit of news so far down here. We don’t have an exact timeline yet, and we don’t want to make any promises that we can’t keep. That said, keep an eye on this spot for further updates as we move forward with this change. We’ll also send out an email to our mailing list once the updates are complete, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, head over to the front page of the site, scroll down to our “stay in the timeloop” section, and get yourself signed up. You wouldn’t want to miss this!
We hope you’ve found this to be an informative, or at least not wildly disappointing, look into the behind-the-scenes life of escape rooms designers. As always, stay tuned with the Clue Chase blog for more behind the scenes information, bad puns, and self deprecating humor. All the cool companies are doing it, and gosh, we just want to be a cool company with all our fellow kids. We hope you can join us for an escape room adventure sometime!
Until then,
Clue Chase
