How To: Real Life Room Escape Games

As a room escape game player, you may be aware that nowadays there are quite a lot of companies/groups out there doing real-life room escape games.  You can fairly easily find such play rooms in cities across the whole world.

As many virtual rooms as I have escaped in computer/mobile device games, I have only been to three real-life room escape games, yet I do had a lot of interesting findings I’d like to share with you.  This might help you to decide whether you should go play one, what you should do to success, or even if you are a newbie and wants to know what all these things are about.

How To: Think Backward

I guess each of us have different ways of cracking the puzzles in Room Escape Games.  I’m opening up a new blog category here called How To, to share tips and thoughts on playing escape games.

One of the most common trick I use to solve a puzzle is to start with the lock, and think backward: basically, go to where you need to input the passcode, and figure out what exactly you need to look for in the room.

Here are some useful tips:

1. What type of passcode do you need to look for?

Are they pure numbers?  Are they letters?  Shapes?  Color?  Or clicks in a certain order?– this is the biggest/easiest hint for you!

2. How long is the passcode?  And what choices do you have?

When I see a lock looking for numbers or letters, my first intuition is always to count how long the passcode is, then click on one of them and keep clicking until it loops back to where you started.  Sometimes the numbers/letters will stuck at some value and that’s the answer to the puzzles. (for example: the first hippo puzzle in Escape Y’s Room by MILD ESCAPE)  In some other situations, looping through all the choices you have you might realize that you can only use some letters/numbers, and that may give you a hint on what’s the passcode.  For example: by looping through all the letters, you find out that you can only type in “S, E, P, C, A, E” and you need to spell a 6-character word– the answer might just be “ESCAPE”!

3. Mind the colors!

Sometimes you are given a puzzle that you need to input some colors in a certain order.  I guarantee that majority of the times you should be able to find these exact colors somewhere else in the room, and most likely you can figure out the order from the hint as well.  In some rare cases you may need to correlate the colors with some objects, like in one of the 20 levels in Dooors Zero by 58Works, you need to link Fire with Red, Tooth with White, and so on.

4. Pay attention to the arrangement.

When it’s asking you to press a bunch of buttons in a certain order, first observe how the buttons are arranged, how many buttons in total are there, and any pattern around the buttons.  Usually when there’s a puzzle like this, you will find its hint somewhere else in the room, in another presentation.  If the buttons are arranged in a certain way (like all form a circular pattern), look for that special arrangement in the room (like maybe somewhere else there are some flowers arranged in circle and they have different sizes).

Share your tricks with us!