I Play A Lot Of Escape Rooms, But Not Too Many: A Personal Retrospective And A Wish

I played 218 escape rooms in 2018. 165 of those rooms were played in the United States, 40 in Moscow and 13 in Hamburg. Not as many as some other enthusiasts I know, but still a respectable number.

Looking at the statistics of my escape room games so far, it looks like my rate of play is accelerating. I first played a room in 2012, and I played no rooms in 2013. I played less than 10 rooms each in 2014 and 2015. Then in 2016 we did our first big escape room trip; I ended up playing 88 rooms that year. In 2017 I played another 135 rooms, and in 2018 the count was 218, including playing as part of the team that set the first Guinness World record for “most escape rooms in a day”.

What originally might have seemed like a fad doesn’t seem to be fading at all. We could debate at which point something stops being “a fad”, but personally I think that if there is still a market 6 years in, then we’re past the fad stage and at the very least in the “awkward teenager” era of the phenomenon.

For 2019, I wish for more interesting and varied themes, and more experiments with narrative, immersion and live actors. I’m sure folks will continue pushing the boundaries of tech and set, so I see no need to wish for that.

The unimaginative theme thing is a pet peeve of mine. There are some embarrassingly overdone themes, which make things less interesting for those of us who have played more than a handful of rooms.

Here are some examples of repetitive themes from my personal list of rooms played:

• 2 rooms have plots about grandmothers with unexpected secrets. You’d think this would be a unique theme, but it’s already a meme. I did not see this coming.
• Houdini seems like an obvious theme for an escape room, but I count only 3 Houdini-themed rooms in my list — that’s about 0.66% of my personal (read: non-random) sample.
• There are 4 Sherlock-themed rooms. Several escape rooms out there are named “Sherlocked”, but I’ve only played one of these so far.
• I spot (or, well, Ctrl-F) 4 rooms with “magician” in their name (not to be confused with wizardry, see below).
• 6 rooms in the list have some kind of “curse” in their title. That’s 1.32% of the total. That’s the same count as Da Vinci rooms, and also rooms that mention “ship” in the name. Speaking of ships, I have 2 “Ghost Ship”s (different rooms by different companies), and one “Cursed Ship”.
• Non-IP-infringing “wizardry school” (aka Harry Potter) is also a big favorite: 6 rooms in my list contain the word “wizard” in their titles (another 3 rooms have the word “witch” in their title, but those tend to be “evil witch” themed, which is totally different).
• 7 rooms have “ghost” in their name. Apparently ghosts are more appealing than wizards.
• Hideouts are a big one, too. I spot 5 rooms with “lair” and 3 with “den” in the title.
• Ancient Egypt is well liked. I count 5 “pharaohs” and 1 “pyramid”. In addition there are others in my list that are pyramid-themed without being obvious about it in the title, including things like “Tomb of Anubis”, “The Curse of Ramses” or “Red Giant”.
• Prison breaks are popular, but not the most popular, oddly. I see 6 rooms with “prison” in the title, 2 with “Alcatraz”, and 1 “penitentiary”. There are a couple of others in the list with less obvious names, and also variants like “Dungeon Prisoners”.
• 9 rooms are themed after a “heist”. These are mostly banks heists, but casino and art heists are also present.
• There are 12 “labs” of different kinds on my list, plus 4 “experiments” and 3 “zombies”. (If you’re wondering why I include the “zombies” here, is because typically the “labs” or “experiments” are about you being trapped in a lab trying to reverse the zombie apocalypse.)
• The most overdone theme is probably the serial psycho killer (plot: psycho has trapped you in a room, and you have to solve puzzles to prove you are worthy of escaping alive). Unfortunately for the amateur statistician, the names of psycho rooms vary enough that it is hard to do an accurate statistic without actually categorizing all the rooms in my list by hand. And honestly some of these were so forgettable, I probably can’t recall what they were about just based on the name.

So here is hoping for more interesting escape room themes and plots in the coming year.