YouTube game reviewer SkillUp talks frequently about the importance of great writing in selling mundane, repetitive content to players, particularly when it comes to single-objective side quests in open world games. He references The Witcher 3 as a game with many great examples (like the famous frying pan quest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-aHUyokr4), but another one that is often referenced is the Supideo quest line in AC: Odyssey ( https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Supideo).
Anyway, I think of this often with respect to real-life escape rooms. I've only done a handful, but of those, so many seem to be completely bare-bones, with little or no scenery, little or no story, basically nothing to justify exactly the type of inanity you describe, where numbers of random objects turn out to be the digits in combination locks or whatever.
However there was one for me that really broke the mold— the premise was that your long-lost great aunt had recently passed away, and you'd gone to recover valuables from her house before it got bulldozed to build a new highway. Quite apart from the nod to Douglas Adams, this immediately led to some terrific justification of otherwise standard game elements:
- Getting trapped in the house because of her paranoia and multiple locks on all the doors and windows.
- Having a time limit, enhanced and communicated by the increasingly loud sounds of construction equipment moving around "outside" the house.
- Needing to make random connections, because she was a little batty and forgetful, so used random objects in her house to help keep track of how to get from room to room.
Obviously the underlying gameplay fundamentals are exactly the same as any other low-budget escape room, but this particular experience really stuck with me as one that I felt far more invested in than usual, due mostly to how much more motivating even this threadbare "plot" was relative to others I'd seen.
Anyway, I think of this often with respect to real-life escape rooms. I've only done a handful, but of those, so many seem to be completely bare-bones, with little or no scenery, little or no story, basically nothing to justify exactly the type of inanity you describe, where numbers of random objects turn out to be the digits in combination locks or whatever.
However there was one for me that really broke the mold— the premise was that your long-lost great aunt had recently passed away, and you'd gone to recover valuables from her house before it got bulldozed to build a new highway. Quite apart from the nod to Douglas Adams, this immediately led to some terrific justification of otherwise standard game elements:
- Getting trapped in the house because of her paranoia and multiple locks on all the doors and windows.
- Having a time limit, enhanced and communicated by the increasingly loud sounds of construction equipment moving around "outside" the house.
- Needing to make random connections, because she was a little batty and forgetful, so used random objects in her house to help keep track of how to get from room to room.
Obviously the underlying gameplay fundamentals are exactly the same as any other low-budget escape room, but this particular experience really stuck with me as one that I felt far more invested in than usual, due mostly to how much more motivating even this threadbare "plot" was relative to others I'd seen.