Are there rooms without a clock or time limit?
Have you ever played a room without a clock or time limit, where you just had to get through the whole thing but it still took about an hour? If so, was it fun?
Posted Sep 13, 2018, 7:57 PM UTC
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I work for a hybrid escape room, The Museum of Intrigue, and only 2 of our 18 games have time limits and those are soft time limits.
We design and build all of our games in house and want our customers to have the full experience of their game and to be challenged by the puzzles and not the clock.
Occasionally we do get a very slow group and things get backed up or the staff has to stay a bit late but, for the most part, it has worked very well for us and the players love it. Just about all of our reviews have been excellent.
Although, we do have a game in development that will have a hard time limit and a leaderboard, for the players who want that kind of challenge.
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I've looked at your site before, I think I saw a link on reddit maybe, don't recall. I can't really figure out how what you do works, but it sounds pretty interesting I think. Because of that, I'm not really sure how it relates to your classic escape room setup - multiple rooms, themes, stories and people booked for specific times.
Do you just show up there, choose how long you want to play, pick a story and start walking through the museum until you find the puzzles you need to play based on the clue? Are there other people roaming around too?
Again, it sounds interesting, I just really don't understand how it works from the website.
Also, I believe there is a small typo in one of the descriptions.
"Every story requires you to keep watch on these strange characters, and interact them as they create distractions ..."
Shouldn't it say "interact with them"?
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We are a new concept in the escape room world. We have a lot of standard escape room fair, logic puzzles, mechanical puzzles, hidden panels, secret codes and lots of locks. Unlike traditional escape rooms, we don't lock players in rooms but have a large area for the players to explore.
We have a 9,000 square foot space set up as a museum with sections set up as different exhibits. All of our games are story based and require players to explore the museum to find and follow clues, solve puzzles unlock their mystery.
Different groups will be playing different games in the museum at the same time but never compete for the same clues, puzzles or objects. They just work around each other if they end up in the same section at the same time.
Our staff are costumed characters and all of our games have built in character interaction, this tends to make hint giving a bit more fun and less intrusive, if the players need help or even an important game object, they may need to perform a task for a character.
We have “20", “40" & “60" minute games but the times are more of a difficulty level or average time. The “60" minute games can be booked in advance and walk-ins can play whatever is available when they come in. We also have special, reservation only, event games that require large groups, 20+ people, to play.
Thanks for catching the typo on our website.
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That sounds fantastic!
Do people ever clash and think a certain puzzle belongs to their story when in fact it doesn’t?
I guess actors could thwart that....
Do groups stick together or do they start to scatter over that 9k sq ft?
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As far as I know we have not had any major problems with groups clashing with each other. We do get people picking up the wrong clue or game object but it is easy for the staff to correct and each of our games has a unique icon, and we tag all of the game objects with their game icons.
Some groups stick together and other split up. It really depends on the group and the game, we have some games that are designed to allow groups to split up, and even encourage it, but not everyone does it.
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I think it would defeat the purpose if there wasn’t a time limit so I haven’t seen that but I have done one room that didn’t have a clock for us to see. I didn’t enjoy that because I felt rushed the whole game. Time goes by quick in escape rooms so I felt like the game would end any second.
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I think a lot of teams badly need this feeling.
Overconfidence leaves some teams taking their sweet time the first 25 minutes, then they realize they aren’t even close and they almost give up.
That constant urgency could be very powerful.
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Good point, but I usually feel like this is only first time players. I work at an escape room and am currently monitoring while writing this lol. I think I also wasted a lot of time my first escape room but on the second I felt a sense of urgency because I knew that’s what made us fail the first time.
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We time our customers but don't make a big deal about it. I find that only experienced players really want to rush through. I actually get annoyed a bit when I do see people really race. Our games are meant as an experience and to be savoured. I can guarantee they're fun games. I think it's all a matter of what players want as it's never the same between groups of players.
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My boyfriend and I played an escape room (which was supposed to have a 60min time limit) at 3pm a few weeks ago.
There were no clocks in the room but the Gamemaster let us know via intercom how much time we had left in random increments. I noticed that I didn’t feel as rushed as usual, but I didn’t think too much of it because, well...puzzles.
After we “escaped” with 2 minutes left we took our picture and left. When we looked at the time it was 4:45pm. Good thing we didn’t have dinner reservations 🙄
We are thinking of doing something similar but letting people know it could take more than an hour, but not more than ~75 minutes.
The situation doesn’t really call for a clock as much as making a “mistake” at the end will leave you with 10 minutes to figure something out - and hopefully you’ve solved enough along the way to figure it out quickly.
This way, everyone gets to solve almost everything AND everyone who plays will get that “we can do this” feeling with 10 minutes left.
But no clock along the way makes me nervous for some reason.
At that point aren’t you just designing a 75 minute escape room with 60 minutes of puzzles?
I think the same thing could be achieved by keeping the same time limit but making your rooms a little easier. It will be hard to get people to pay more even if the game is longer, if there is competition in your area.
We puzzle and guide our rooms with the intention of everyone getting close, but only a few (less the 40%) actually escaping.