Even though escape room games have been around in the UK for just over five years, the majority of the population are yet to try one. So if you’re brand new to the fun or have done a couple but are looking to improve your skills, read on for the most important tips of how to succeed at escaping!
- Communication is King!
At the risk of sounding like the boring chap in a suit who has been brought in to your workplace to instil in you the importance of communication, it is the most important part of working in a team, which is what escape rooms are all about. Make sure you think out loud whilst you play, let everybody else on your team know what you find and what you’re thinking it might relate to. Somebody else might have found a related item and not shouted it out, but by talking you can expedite the time it takes to work out what goes with what and get to the fun part of puzzle solving much quicker. - Search with your hands, not just with your eyes.
The beauty of escape rooms being live interactive entertainment is that the rooms will be live and interactive as well! So don’t just stand in a room looking around, get stuck in, open every cupboard and drawer, empty every bucket of stuff and physically search everywhere. Feel every bit of décor to see if it shifts, moves, rotates or presses. Be thorough, but always make sure to never break the golden rule of escape rooms – never use force. If something is going to move then it will with little effort. No need to get two people onto a cupboard handle to try and break it open. - Always remember the mantra… “what haven’t I used?”
If you find yourself getting stuck and don’t know what to do next, repeat to yourself over and over again “what haven’t we used?”. The usual convention in escape rooms is that each item is to be used for one puzzle only, so if there is an object in the room that hasn’t served a purpose yet then remember to keep it in mind. It may of course just be there for decoration, but it also may be the key item to help you progress to your goal! - Look for what is relevant.
This is something that is definitely learned over the course of doing more escape rooms, but it is important to get a grasp of what in the room is significant and what is likely to not be. If you’re playing a room with 4 digit combination locks for example, don’t just start trying every 4 digit number you see in the room, especially if it’s a serial number or date on the bottom of a postcard. Escape rooms should point the players towards the correct answer, or have a way of highlighting the important information to make it stand out from what is purely decoration. - There’s no such thing as a stupid idea.
I can’t count the number of times we’ve seen people in our games suggest the correct solution to a puzzle or use of an item, only to be shouted down or laughed at by other players in the room. The beauty of escape rooms is that anything is possible, if you have thought of an idea then there’s every possibility that the game designers thought of it too and it’s correct. Either way, you should probably give it a go. Listen to everybody’s ideas.
If you fancy giving an escape room a go, check out www.exitgames.co.uk to find a game near you.