Week 1: Story and Report

Escape Room Story

Rachel Wang + Alina Liu

Backstory

You are going to a courier station to get your package. It is very late at night, and you are the last customer before closing. While you are looking for your package on the shelves, the station worker leaves the courier station and locks the door from outside without noticing you. As the night falls, it becomes cooler and cooler in the station. You need to use the tools you can find and other people’s packages to help yourself out as soon as possible.

Environment

Tall metal shelves take up most of the space in the room. Various sizes and colors packages are stacked on top of each other on the shelves according to a numbering system like a library. The rest of the room is like a mini office, with a front desk, some file cabinets, and some plants. In order to keep a good storage condition, the windows are high up on the walls to avoid sunlight. The high-security front door makes it very hard to breakthrough.

Moodboard

Escape Room Report

Madorica Real Estate

Backstory

You are a new employee at a real estate agency. In this city, there are many properties with ghosts living in them. In Madorica Real Estate, you have to search for properties that don’t have ghosts in the entire city.

Your job requires you to exorcise the ghosts in each room so that the new owners can live there in peace. Hints to beating the ghosts can be found around the rooms and from Mr. Madorica.

Game Mechanism

The game experience is a combination of pen and paper puzzles and game console interaction, which has been described as a “marriage of analog and digital” by Famitsu. Each level is an estate building, usually contains several rooms. Using the game console, you can navigate in the three-dimensional space in a first-person view. Most of the hints are hiding in the room space. By using ABXY and arrow keys to input commands, you can open doors, teleport between rooms, exorcise the ghosts. Floor plan maps need to be printed in advance. There are used to document found hints and commands, and to know which room you are in the estate. Although the digital version could be downloaded, you can enjoy more by printing out the floor plan and play with it, since there are some scissors cutting and folding needed too.

Players All the tasks can be completed by a single player. However, the suggested number of players is 2-3 people. If you are playing the game on Nintendo Switch and using the Joy-Con, two players can each control one Joy-Con to input commands. One player can also be the recorder, to transfer the information to the floor plan map.

Room Setting

The rooms are mostly empty, with no furniture and little decorations, matching the idea of ready to sell properties. The setting of the rooms depends on the theme (museum, apartment, townhouse, etc). Because of the haunted house idea, the style of the rooms is mostly surrealism.

Types of puzzles

You need to use the hints in the room to find the right ‘command’ (a line of ABXY and arrow keys combination in a different order), to move in between rooms. Puzzles include matching images, understanding 3D spaces. But there is no picking or moving anything in the room.