The Priestess in Cage (An Escape Room Puzzle or Challenge)
* This is a collaborative project by Xintong Ye and Yang Hong.
Aims, project management and outcome
At first, what we hoped to make looked like a fruit machine, with three windows that show some different stages of three specific objects in a rolling way. Besides, there’re three buttons for scene choosing and a button for stopping the stages from rolling. What players need to do is to hit the buttons when applicable matches happen, thus they can get several lines of a narrative poem as the hint to get access to the next step of the whole escape room challenge. This design came from a worldview that we constructed inspired by Borges, in which the concept of ‘time’ didn’t exist in the objective world but every individual. All the individuals could decide the speed of time of themselves and loop in their own time circle, but different individuals were still able to touch each other and make stories happen.
The narrative poem, at first, was not essential but a romantic interest of us. After adjusting it happened to be the most important part. As the first version was confirmed not easy to be implemented in a physical escape room later, in addition, hard for players to realise the complex worldview simply through this design, this puzzle finally came to the current version.
In the final version, players automatically get several parts of a narrative poem, which, in a whole challenge, should be found from the previous scenes. They can find switchable paintings and three clock-like items on the wall, representing three ‘individuals’ – the priestess, the lord, and a pile of dust, with different stages on the dial plate to point at. Players change the scenes and move the pointers to make matches according to the poem and gain utensils for taking out the heart from the priestess sculpture in the room to escape.
Playtest feedback and reflection
1. It was hard for all the testing players to locate the mention of dust in the poem, as the stages changed too dramatic, for instance, from dust to a crucible. Things showed better when the ‘individuals’ were human beings, but there were still problems – players might develop different understanding from the verbal hint, for example, whether ‘powerful’ referred to a priestess at her younger or elder age, as someone might imagine physical power whilst others imagine magic power.
2. There’re 6 parts in total. For the first part, we didn’t make it simple enough to make it as a guide, and that brought confusion to some players who started trying to combine the different parts, which would lead to an impasse. Also, the addition of scenes made it more complex which shall be discussed whether to be kept.
3. As this prototype relies extremely on the text and neither of the designers is an English native speaker, it hinders the players more when it comes to the English version rather than the Chinese one. If we redesign this prototype, a localization such as a polish or even rewriting should be rigid demand.
Other
This prototype shares the same narrative content with The Priestess in Cage (Twine or Bisty Narrative Game). By applying the same story we are trying to experience and compare the different constructing ways of storytelling in different game types.