Aim

• To promote the use multiple physical locations over the course of the puzzle
• To make the puzzles simple enough that minimal to no guidance would be required to solve them
• To create a window into the life of a character, whose steps you trace over the duration of the escape room

Approach

1. Finding common ground in our narrative interests; leading us to lean toward something that was mystery and heist focused.
2. Planning out and trying interesting ideas for the puzzles.
3. Making the story element convincing by creating an ‘authentic’ journal.
4. Planning out the flow of puzzles and how they fit into the journal.

Feedback

• The feeling of being able to flip through the journal and interact with it is a pleasing experience.
• The players did not expect to have to leave the room and move to another. This led to a lot of confusion when moving from one part of the puzzle to the next.
• The players had to be told specifically how many parts there were to the puzzle or that they had found all the clues. They kept looking for more once they realized how the clues were hidden.
• Some clues were too well hidden, making them a pain to find – in particular the fact that the players would have to leave the room and move to the library to continue progressing in the game.

Outcomes

After playtesting we realised that players would need way more subtle prompting and hints hidden in plain sight through the journal. Adding flavour text and changing up the font at important bits should address the issues we found while testing.

Testing over and over was a tedious process due to the nature of the puzzles as they required the players to do activities such as cutting pages or parts of pages out of the journal.