A kindly nun and a locked study in an Irish convent: a benign story quickly turns into a nightmare of light and dark, life and death, salvation and damnation in a world that evokes a serial killer of an earlier era. Escape rooms are a vital and rapidly growing form of collaborative play, “live-action team-based games where players
discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal (usually escaping from the room) in a limited amount of time” (Nicholson, 2015, p. 1). Nicholson’s seminal definition foregrounds the game-like character of escape rooms and the formal core of puzzle sequences that shape the experience. The game-like nature of escape rooms suggests that design practices
from game and puzzle design can be fruitfully applied in escape room design, which is important, since—besides articles offering useful design principles (Nicholson, 2016)—there are just a few texts devoted to escape room design (Clare, 2016).
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