The importance of the curfews introduced to contain the COVID-19 pandemic — familiar to everyone — and of general social distancing is beyond dispute. Restaurants, bars and other badly affected businesses have tried to avoid the resulting economic crisis, or at least soften it as far as possible, in a thousand ingenious ways: launching webshops, building home-delivery systems. Escape rooms worldwide faced a similar situation, since they cannot receive teams and so effectively had to close.
Out of this tight spot came the idea of the online escape room (it existed earlier too, but this is why it began to spread). It works like this: teams play the game from the comfort — and of course the safety — of home, each person logging in separately from their own laptop or phone. Only the game master is on site, and so becomes the players’ eyes, ears and hands. Through a camera they show the players the room, the padlocks and the puzzles, and on that basis, by giving the game master instructions, the players try to solve the room. Picture the whole thing as a group video chat, but on a platform where the camera feed relayed by the game master — and occasionally a document relating to the game — is at the centre of everything.
What kinds of escape room work in an online version?
Broadly we distinguish two kinds of escape room: the old classic rooms and the new-generation ones. The classic rooms are characterised by padlocks, locks and keys, and by logic, searching and dexterity tasks. New-generation rooms are characterised by magnetic locks, hidden remote controls (a wand, say), proxies and, in general, game elements requiring programming and electronics: displays, sensors and so on. It is rare, of course, for a room to work with only one kind of element; most are a mixture of the two.
Of these, the online escape room focuses more on thinking, logic-based puzzles, since only the game master is on site. A dexterity task, for instance, would give the team no sense of achievement at all, because they would merely watch the game master perform something he has doubtless done a thousand times. Searching tasks aren’t much fun in this format either, for the same reasons.
So what remains are the various code-breaking, logic and association puzzles, which offer more of a classic padlock-key-code escape room experience. On the other hand, being able to send documents, images and videos to the team through the online platform adds an interesting new layer to the game — one worth experimenting with, and one that can still bring something new and fresh to the toolkit of classic rooms.
Where did the online solution come from?
The escape room is famously a Hungarian invention, so it is no wonder that the first online platform came from a Hungarian company too. Exit The Room built the EveryEscapeRoom hub through which the whole system runs. What’s more, any escape room owner can apply, request to join and use the platform — entirely free of charge, which is an enormous help and no small act of generosity on their part.
The EveryEscapeRoom hub helps take the solution worldwide. Operators were asked to devote part of the revenue earned this way to the fight against the coronavirus.
