Adventure Gamers - Forums

Oh hey there.

I haven’t posted in this forum in like 15 years but I used to be a regular. Work, family, kids can really cramp your style!

I just learned about a real life adventure game called Escape the Room and it sounds like you and your friends get locked in a room and have to find and decipher cryptic clues to find a way out. My friend was telling me about it and I said, “I feel like I’ve been training my whole life for this.”

Anyway, I was wondering if any of you have tried this and what it was like. Is it worth paying a babysitter for?

Here’s a link to the one near me.  I think they have games all over the world.

http://www.escapetheroomphilly.com

Thanks,
Tim

i have played a few real life escape the rooms…but what is the point…this topic will be deleted very soon from now.

Point is adventure games have evolved over the years. Started as text based and moved to point and click. Some games have really pushed the boundaries of what we consider a traditional adventure game.

A real life game with the same principles of the adventure games I’ve always known and loved sounds intriguing and fun. I was wondering if anyone here had tried it and what you thought.

I remember a thread on this forum years ago in which people were discussing times they found themselves in real life situations when they had to use adventure game principles to help themselves. It was fun and no one deleted the thread.

timpooz - 03 September 2016 08:05 AM

Point is adventure games have evolved over the years. Started as text based and moved to point and click. Some games have really pushed the boundaries of what we consider a traditional adventure game.

A real life game with the same principles of the adventure games I’ve always known and loved sounds intriguing and fun. I was wondering if anyone here had tried it and what you thought.

I remember a thread on this forum years ago in which people were discussing times they found themselves in real life situations when they had to use adventure game principles to help themselves. It was fun and no one deleted the thread.

Your opening post sounded to be like that of a bot. if you are truly to engage a discussion here than i apologize for my wrong presumption.

Iv been to six of these and its been turning into a hobby. And yes, its live action adventure gaming and its seeing a surge in popularity. For me one thing i look for is games that hire legit actors for a really immersive experience. Some others are pretty story lite and just focus on the puzzles. Games that are story intensive are particularly fantastic and i have reccomendations for the newyork and boston areas.

Me - a bot? Does not compute!

I like the idea of making it story focused if possible. Just sitting in a room sounding puzzles might be fun but more immersive is better.  And that right there is one of those debates on what makes a great adventure game - puzzle vs. story, right?

Zane, have these been difficult? Glad to hear it does have adventure game elements that hopefully will make it more fun.  I will definitely ask for recommendations if I look to do this in NYC or Boston. They have it where I live in Philly so I make start there.

Thanks!

Just like adventure games the types of puzzles and difficulty varies a lot. Some rooms have a more linear progression while others are designed for the group to scatter in different directions and bring clues together. Also some focus more on cryptology and message decoding, while others might focus on hands-on visual puzzles. A difficult part to anticipate is your group chemistry, odds are you’ll be doing this with at least some strangers and its not always easy to instantly click with people you just met and working together is important. My favorite room iv done they handcuff you and lock you in separate cells that are next to eachother and you need to verbally communicate and hand things off into the other cells. Theres only so much you can do by yourself and the cooperation makes for some very interesting puzzles.

odds are you’ll be doing this with at least some strangers

Why? Around here most rooms can be done with 2-4 persons, surely you have 3 friends.

Antrax - 06 September 2016 11:48 PM

odds are you’ll be doing this with at least some strangers

Why? Around here most rooms can be done with 2-4 persons, surely you have 3 friends.

Most of the ones I’ve looked up around here say they will likely put you with other people unless you book the room’s entire capacity. So even if the room CAN be done with 4, if they have 8 spots available they likely will put another 4 people in with you unless nobody else wants to book that time.

It definitely has broad appeal, and theres many sorts of themes you can find: zombie/horror, crime scene investigation, fallout shelter, insane asylum, are some that iv seen. Iv always thought our genre has broad appeal, people just dont know it (or realize theyr playing an adventure). Some people might enjoy searching behind every painting and opening every drawer, while others might prefer decoding messages or opening a puzzle box. So a well made room appeals to a broad group.
Average capacity iv found is 6-8 people, and yes the place will book to capacity unless you pay for the whole room.

I think the “fill to capacity” depends on the city/country. Here no room has this policy since the whole point is teamwork and who wants to teamwork with strangers? The rooms also have configurable difficulty, and they usually set it based on the team’s experience, which won’t be uniform with a random group.

The way it works is you get put in a room and have 60 minutes to escape/locate an object. An operator watches you and hears your conversations, and you’re free to appeal to get a hint whenever you feel stuck.

The physical hindrances to progression can be locks (regular or combination) and can be more elaborate mechanisms (they use magnets embedded in objects in the room, so pretty much anything can trigger a reaction). The rooms are fully automated.
Puzzles can range from pixel hunts (finding a physical key to a lock somewhere in the room) to inventory (finding the right object to fish a key from behind glass is one I had recently), slider-type puzzles or decoding stuff, which can range from simple to complex.
To give an example, in the last room I was in, a puzzle chain looked like this: find a physical key to a locked cupboard. Inside is a light switch. You turn off the light, need to notice one of the pictures on the wall, featuring chess pieces, is glowing. The glowing pieces need to be correlated to a chess board in the room, where the rows correspond to digits in a combination lock located elsewhere. So, it’s not always super obvious.

The rooms are usually very cool-looking, matching the backstory. In that sense, immersion is easy.

Some rooms have actors within the room, some don’t. I personally prefer no actors.

Operators aim to get everyone to succeed in the nick of time. They won’t admit to it but they have a variety of less-explicit hints they can trigger if they see you’re on the right track and was distracted by something irrelevant. You can ask them not to fudge at all but I think this adds to the enjoyment, not detracts from it, especially if the operator is good.

So, I would certainly recommend it to others, regardless of their AG experience. Some of the more lateral thinking type things can be difficult to people who aren’t experienced with cat mustache puzzles, but you can pick a room or set the difficulty so this won’t be an issue.

TimovieMan - 08 September 2016 02:29 AM

I so HAVE to try this. Now how to get the missus and some of the friends excited???

Step 1: find rooms with themes they are interested in