How to Design an Escape Room

BY Future of StoryTelling — February 16, 2023

Escape rooms give audiences the opportunity to use their minds and bodies in an exciting, participatory experience. Victor van Doorn and his company Sherlocked are taking that offering to the next level by integrating deep storytelling into their rooms for an altogether more immersive experience. Hear Victor talk about how to design with an eye towards narrative and flow on today’s episode of the FoST podcast.

Available wherever you listen to your podcasts:

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Additional Links:

• Sherlocked's website

• Check out the Alchemist

• The Alchemist puzzle contest

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Episode Transcript

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder of The Future of StoryTelling, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the FoST podcast. Like many forms of immersive entertainment, escape rooms have continued to grow in popularity as people crave more active, participatory and exciting experiences. The industry in the US has seen steady growth, even despite the pandemic. While in China, the popularity of escape rooms has exploded with over 45,000 venues in operation in 2021.

In turn, many escape room designers are pushing the envelope with their creations. They're now aiming not only to design a fun evening of puzzles and challenges, but to give participants an opportunity to use both their minds and their bodies in a narrative experience that feels more real than ever before. I recently had the pleasure of experiencing a good example of this in Amsterdam, where some of the world's best escape rooms are located. While playing The Vault, A room created by Dutch company Sherlocked, I was struck by how much the story informed the game. I think designers of any experience can learn from this approach. By integrating the narrative with the activity, the entire experience becomes more engaging and ultimately more enjoyable. So today I'm honored to sit down with Sherlocked co-founder Victor van Doorn to talk about how he and his company approach escape room design. Please join me in welcoming Victor van Doorn.

Victor, welcome to the FoST podcast. So happy to have you with us today. I'm excited. This is going to be fun. Now I just have to start by bringing a scene to mind, where I'm in Amsterdam, I'm in a vault, a bank vault, and I'm with four other people. We're trying to sort of break into something. I realize that the only way I'm going to be able to get through this escape room is if I pull off this metal panel and crawl into what I can only describe as looking kind of like a hamster maze made out of metal, and I'm crawling into this to try to get into this little room with this special piece.

And at a certain moment I realize I have to go even higher up and the space is even tighter, and I crawl in there and all of a sudden I can't turn. And I'm having this moment of panic that I'm too big for this space and I'm caught in this maze. And all of a sudden what felt like just fun and games shifted to feel like, "Uh oh, this is real. This is real, I can't bend this metal and if I get stuck in here, I'm stuck in here." And it just made this game that you had designed, The Vault it's called, this escape room, so powerful. It raised the stakes for me instantly and made me realize that this was not some video game, this was not some card game, but this was an experience that I was having in a very embodied and real way. Perhaps you could just tell us a little bit about the origins of the vault and how you went about designing that.

Victor van Doorn:

Yeah. Oh, thank you for sharing that experience because it's a moment in that game that is not mentioned often. I'm really happy to hear this because one of our things, our signature things with Sherlocked, is to blur fiction and reality as much as is comfortable or a little bit beyond what is comfortable. We don't want to traumatize people. We want people to forget that they're in a game to the degree that they don't actually panic. So I'm so glad to hear that you were close to that, and I'm also very happy to know that had you gone into claustrophobic panic, we have a button that releases all the metal doors, mag locks.

Charlie Melcher:

Oh, great.

Victor van Doorn:

Yes.

Charlie Melcher:

I didn't know that at the time. What I did instead was take a few deep breaths.

Victor van Doorn:

Perfect. I'm glad you didn't know that.

Charlie Melcher:

And then stretch a little more.

Victor van Doorn:

Yeah, I'm super happy that you didn't know that. And that's actually the first thing that when people ask me, "What does Sherlocked do differently than most other escape rooms?" I think that's the first one, is this blurring of fiction and reality and trying to make things as real as possible.

Charlie Melcher:

Right. Well, part of it was just the location. I mean, we really were in an old bank vault as we're moving through. I mean, there were elements to the physical space that you could never have built. They were just huge and massive and metal and things that were part of the building and made it all the more authentic, all the more real.

Victor van Doorn:

I think it's easier for us in Europe where we have access to a lot more historical buildings, but actually this building's not that old. It's like 120 years old, which for European and Amsterdam standards, it's relatively new, but it is very special and it is fully made of brick and it really breathes this authentic, exciting like mystery movie kind of vibe. And we pay the price for it, literally in the sense that our rent is between two and three times as much as the general average is for escape rooms. So we have to charge a premium price and we have less profit than my friends in the escape room community who have built their experiences inside less authentic places. And as long as we have enough money to pay the rent and make new things, we will always prioritize authentic feel over profit.

Charlie Melcher:

And how did you set out to write this story?

Victor van Doorn:

The Vault is our second production. Our first one was our first experimentation with the format of escape rooms. So back in 2014, we created something called The Architect, and that was our reaction to what was at the time considered escape rooms, which was relatively less immersive, more puzzle focused and not very story focused. And we, me and my co-founders, we all have a different kind of artistic background where we are used to a certain buildup, a desire for telling stories, et cetera. And when we played the first few escape rooms that came on our radar, which was in London in 2013, we noticed a big lack of that. And so we created a first game, The Architect, very story focused, also very focused on authenticity and diversity of puzzle and challenge.

Charlie Melcher:

Just to clarify, the kinds of escape rooms you were seeing then were much more around puzzles and locks and solving simple kinds of mechanical challenges, is that right?

Victor van Doorn:

Exactly. They were really fun, and if they weren't as fun as they were, I would never have been inspired to go into this field. So I want to give credit where credit is due. But it was very entertainment focused, and it was already really ambitious to have puzzles that were looking like they belonged in the theme of the premise of the experience, but they weren't native to the experience and we wished to change that. If you ask for any given escape room, "Why are there puzzles?" In my mind, a good escape room has a clear and obvious answer to that.

And for The Vault, you are breaking into this very elaborately protected vault that only family members of the four founding families know, and you as non-members of these families, you have to crack their thinking, you have to pretend to be these families in order to open the final vault. And so that's the justification of why are there obstacles? And then for the new production that we're making, The Alchemist, it's a different justification altogether is you're creating a ritual. So everything you're doing, whether it's a puzzle or a simple challenge or just constructing something, it is an ingredient for a very powerful ritual.

Charlie Melcher:

What I'm so interested about what you just said is in traditional storytelling, there always has to be a kind of motivation for the character that's consistent with their arc, with their story, and here what you're saying is that the actions of the guests, of the players, those actions have to have that same kind of consistency of motivation. They have to be woven into the fabric of the story doing some random puzzle, but your physical actions and challenges are moving the narrative forward or fit in with an integrity into the narrative.

Victor van Doorn:

Well said. They have to make sense because if they don't, on some level you will be taken out of the story and then the immersion is broken. And one of the big goals is to get in that kind of immersive flow state, and everything that takes you out of that, whether it's an action that doesn't make sense within that narrative or an anachronistic exit sign, say that your experience takes place in the 1920s and you have a very modern looking exit sign, that on some level will take you out. So we try to remove all these anti-immersive kind of elements.

Charlie Melcher:

So you mentioned that word flow, a flow state. Why is that important for an escape room for your stories?

Victor van Doorn:

To be in a flow state is to be in one of the best kinds of states that you can experience as human, and you know it from when you work evenings being so inspired working on something that words just roll out of your fingers onto the page, or if you're composing something, it just rolls into the piano, or whatever you're doing, it just flows. And I think that as a human I think is one of the highest states you can reach. And in a game, the equivalent is being challenged by something but also succeeding, rising to that challenge, rising to the occasion and flow to us as designers is creating a challenge that is hard enough for people to be proud of it when they succeed.

Charlie Melcher:

Yes. I mean, I always think of a flow state as being this moment when your sort of spirit and your body are aligned and time falls away.

Victor van Doorn:

Yes.

Charlie Melcher:

What happens inside their head and inside their body are all aligned and they lose sense of time. They're just so in it in the moment. That's another... it seems like it's an essential piece of getting really powerful immersion.

Victor van Doorn:

Absolutely crucial. And I have to again, give credit where credit is due. Maybe 70% of that can be due to design decisions that we make. But I think 30% is due to one design decision that our escape room forefathers and mothers decided on, to leave your phone behind, because we are so distractable in our usual lives. Just the simple fact of not being reachable and not being distractable by your smartphone makes such a difference in being present. So we will always try to figure out a good reason, a justification for people to leave their phones behind.

Charlie Melcher:

So it seems like presence is another component to get to flow.

Victor van Doorn:

Yes, it is. Yeah. Or it is a result of being in flow. So yeah, if you're present, you're much more open to flow for sure. And if you're distractable, you're less open to it.

Charlie Melcher:

What are some of the other secrets for really good escape room design? We've talked about a few things already, the importance of the physical space, the importance of getting people into a flow state. What else do you think about when you're designing immersive experience?

Victor van Doorn:

So a very important one that I for myself took from the filmmaking process is structure and that your stories or experiences needs a rhythm. They cannot be high adrenaline all the time, and they cannot be low adrenaline all the time because it will be either too stressful or too boring. So again, to kind of reach... have a good flow state, you want to operate between and not just constantly between, but kind of play with the extremes. In The Vault, there are also couple of plateaus where you feel safe. There's not constantly happening something around you. You cannot kind of reset your ram. And something also we've learned the hard way is that you need rising stakes. So you need to build to something that will give a great climax. And I agree with the peak end rule that the peak of an experience, that climax is one of the most memorable ones, and the way that you exit the experience after that as well.

And the exit of course is very kind of self-fulfilling because that's the last moment of an experience that you remember. So when you go back in your mind, that's the first that you reach when you backtrack. But the peak one is very important. And I think with The Vault, something that took us a while to get right, like years, is to compensate for its very spectacular beginning. One more note about designing a very good beginning, I think again, in filmmaking, you often see that the first act of a movie is really interesting and very fresh and has a really good pace. And oftentimes, at least in my experience, but I've also read this from other people, it's because that's what writers begin with. So they give a lot of love and care to the first part, and then they get closer to the deadline and they have less attention to spend. And so that for The Alchemist, our way to compensate for that is that we began with the ending.

Charlie Melcher:

Do you think about though the physical actions that you're putting your players through? Do you think about how that's part of your storytelling and what kind of emotions you're eliciting in the body when you're making somebody contort through a maze or avoid the laser beams and be flexible in a Tom Cruise kind of way? How much do you give thought to how the physical gestures or experiences are affecting the narrative and the emotions for the players?

Victor van Doorn:

A lot. I think mostly on a subconscious level because me, myself, I love physical movement. I need to move, I need to work out at least a few times per week to be happy. So I'm a relatively physical person, and so I think we all design from the question, "Wouldn't it be cool if?" And because I like physical stuff as much as I do, there will always be a wish to incorporate some physical challenges in the experience.

And what we try to do is, because not everyone's like me, we try to make it opt in. So you, Charlie, were the person who went into the cage maze and perhaps someone else went into the laser maze, and those can be the same person in the group. So if you're with five people of which four are not very physically inclined, then there's one person, we hoped always, that there's one person who will volunteer for the laser maze and the cage maze. And those two in the vault are the most physical elements. So it's just important that there's something there because that generates adrenaline. It generates all the right kinds of hormones that you want for people to be in an immersed flow state.

Charlie Melcher:

And it's funny, and for me, in that moment I found the trapped door, the metal door that gave you access, I kind of saw in my mind what I thought was going to happen, and I was so excited to have found it because we had been missing this one clue that was what we could get if we went through the maze that when I opened that door, I didn't even give thought to it. I was just like, "I'm in. I'm in." And frankly, I was the tallest one in the group, so it probably was the least logical choice for me to be the one who was going to climb through this little maze, but I was just so excited to have found it that I didn't even give thought to it. I just jumped right in.

And I think that that is a flow state. So that again, brought it all the more home and made it all the more real. What about the need to play with people's expectations, but also to provide original or surprise elements? There were a couple of things in there that were drawing on tropes of a vault heist. The lasers are a good example because we've all seen movies like that, and then there were other things that were unexpected or that we hadn't seen before. I just wonder how you think about balancing drawing on things that everyone knows versus some surprises that are original?

Victor van Doorn:

We often limit ourselves a bit too much thinking, "Oh, this is cliche, we shouldn't do it." And I'm usually the one who then says, "Yeah, but is it cliche in a bad way or is it fulfilling a childhood fantasy?" So the laser maze is a very good example of where we broke our own rule of something needing to make sense within the narrative. It only makes sense on a pop culture reference level because there isn't a safe in the world that is protected by laser beams, because laser beams are the worst. They are very specific, they're visible, you can circumvent them.

But because we've seen Catherine Zeta-Jones maneuvering them, because we've seen the Tom Cruise maneuvering them, it's part of the collective subconscious of what a heist is, and then seeing that, especially kids, you hear their reactions like, "Oh my god, a laser maze! I want it. I want it." I would not dream to take that away from the experience in favor of realism. So if something is a fulfillment of a subconscious element, something that you've seen in movies or stories, and then people get excited by the idea of physically doing it, then it's in. So we don't shy away from cliches in that sense.

Charlie Melcher:

You've also talked to me in the past about this idea of bleed, or blurring. Tell me what you mean by that.

Victor van Doorn:

There's two sides of that. So the one side we've already kind of talked about is where we make things as realistic as possible, where we use an authentic vault space as a setting for a heist experience, and then the other one is that we extend the experience beyond the borders of what is usually considered appropriate. And the extent of which we do this is even a bit beyond this. So I think it's an open secret that The Vault doesn't start at the location, but it starts around the corner in the parking garage.

Just the fact that it starts in a parking garage and you have to do something there before actually arriving at the location means that the story starts when people are off guard. It's in their normal world, and so everything is possible, everything's part of the game, and that is wonderful and also a little dangerous because then the wonderful part of it is that everyone who's walking around in that parking garage is potentially part of the game or feels like a paid extra, as it were. So it's cheap production value. The downside of it is that they can start searching everywhere, they can start asking people questions. We've had one time a team that was kind of harassing just a person who was just there to get their car.

Charlie Melcher:

Oh no.

Victor van Doorn:

Yeah. The most intense example I can give is that somebody called the police because they thought we were doing... our players were doing a drug deal and they were arrested, so they were brought to the police station because they were behaving in such a suspicious way. The experience of those players was amazing. They were like, "Holy shit, the production value on this thing is so big."

Charlie Melcher:

Right, these look like real cops.

Victor van Doorn:

Exactly. Yeah, and the fun thing there is that we actually talked to the police while they were in custody, very quickly we were on top of it, and they then understood and they actually already had a mention that we were doing this game in this building. So from past experiences, they had a note from it. And then what we did is that one of us went there and played as their lawyer and got them out in story, and the police was very kind. They played along so we could kind of seamlessly continue the experience.

Charlie Melcher:

Oh my goodness. Wow. Talk about improvisation.

Victor van Doorn:

Yeah, we did have to move the starting time of the next game though.

Charlie Melcher:

So that's an example of a kind of blurring between the fiction and real worlds.

Victor van Doorn:

Correct.

Charlie Melcher:

Got it. Got it. And all of this is really just providing sets of experiences that the people formerly known as the audience are looking for. Tell me about how you see the "audience" evolving.

Victor van Doorn:

So we see different kinds of groups that are attracted to our kind of offering. There's people who just want to have fun. There's people who really want to be challenged rationally, in their rational mind, their kind of Sherlock Holmes kind of capabilities. We see people who want to do team building with their company and have a unifying bonding experience, which is a relatively rewarding audience because they have relatively low expectations and then they come out swinging. It's really fun. I can imagine that the audience of immersive theater is evolving more towards being engaged and made part of the experience.

So Punchdrunk has really broken the mold by letting people move through the story and being part of it in that sense, what I as a maybe next generation audience member really love, which I love that the Peaky Blinders experience, is that there was something for me to do, that the plot moves forward because of my participation, which is also what you described as enjoying with The Vault. And I think there's a lot to learn from the LARPing community there. There's this LARPing expert who maybe you'd like to interview at some point, Johanna Koljonen, who's very experienced at this. I learned a lot also from the people who create the College of Extraordinary experiences who come from the LARP world. So I think there's a lot to learn there because they've been doing this for decades.

Charlie Melcher:

Let's talk a little bit about the business of escape rooms. So how many people at a time can go through The Vault?

Victor van Doorn:

Okay, so you're striking... you're touching on a difficult part of running an escape room business, especially if you don't have many different stories running at the same time, many different rooms on offer, is that it's quite limited. We have capped the team size, aka audience size, to six, which is really intimate. The reason why we capped it at six is that you're working as one team, and six is kind of the maximum where you, in one glance, if you look around a room, you can see what everyone's working on. In terms of business model, if you make sets like ours or use spaces like ours, which are like 150 square meters, which is, I don't even know, I think that's times 10 for a square footage, it's a lot. And it's a hefty rent for something that people in these small groups pay for. So we have, I think our ticket price is around $30 per person, give or take, depending on your team size, which is still cheap in compared to a theater ticket.

Charlie Melcher:

And how many live staff members or actors for each group of six?

Victor van Doorn:

So the cheaper escape rooms, they actually kind of push the envelope on this, in my opinion, not a good way. They let one game master host multiple teams at the same time, which you will notice when you're playing that when you need some help, you have to wait a little bit. That's something we don't like. So we go for the less financially efficient route of having one game master watching one game. And there's actually a nice interplay for The Vault and The Architect, our first two escape rooms at the location, is that there is a moment for The Architect where there's not a lot of help needed, and The Architect host will be able to play a part in the vault. So for your experience as a player was that there's at least two, maybe even three people involved in that experience because you also have contact with your henchman, your accomplice over the walkie-talkie. So I think we make good use of the people we have there, and it's a very rich experience that way.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, I felt like we had three different people. There was somebody on the walkie-talkie, there was the art person who let us into the gallery and there was the police. So again, I'm just thinking about the economics of this. It felt like there were three people working this game and there were five of us playing it, the economic model here is worrisome. I'm worried for you, Victor.

Victor van Doorn:

Thank you, Charlie. I'm worried for me too. Yeah, no, I mean on the one hand it is worrisome, on the other hand, we can't complain because we have such a good reputation and we're in such a good location in a city that has a lot of visitors all the time, that we have been... the fact that we still sell out The Architect at the moment, almost daily, as escape rooms go, we are a remarkably inefficient yet well performing organization. I would like to be more efficient and performing even better. And I remember us talking about this, Charlie, it's always so attractive to work with one of these big name companies and to have the idea of a big bag of money on your account in one go, but being a badly disciplined creative, I'm always going to spend all that money on the production. So I'm not the right person for this kind of model. Because I remember for instance, on the Google project, the thing that we made the most money on was actually removing the build at the end.

Charlie Melcher:

You made more being paid to strip it out than putting it in.

Victor van Doorn:

Yeah, exactly. So maybe we could become a bit more... we could be a little more strict on this, but my favorite model still is making a product, something that can run that you make once, that you invest a lot of care into and then it runs. And for The Alchemist, that is our approach. We've never invested as much money as we have or as much time, and time definitely is money, in a production as we have with The Alchemist, and we made it for the ages.

Charlie Melcher:

With that, I can't wait for the new experience from Sherlocked. This is going to be amazing. When do you open?

Victor van Doorn:

We've learned from past experiences to only pinpoint a date when it's actually ready. So we don't know. We're working as hard as we can while trying not to get a burnout. It's delayed for good reasons. Some things just needed a bit more time, like for instance, the climax spectacle. Very happy to give that a bit more time. Yeah, I mean it's a juggle, but we'll give a date when we believe it ourselves.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I can't wait to go do that one when the time's right. Victor, thank you so much for being with me today. I really enjoyed the conversation and can't wait to see you again in Amsterdam, hopefully sometime soon.

Victor van Doorn:

It was my absolute pleasure. Great talk to you.

Charlie Melcher:

A warm thank you to Victor van Doorn again for joining me on today's podcast. To learn more about his company, Sherlocked, and their remarkable work, please visit the links in the episode's description. And my sincere thanks to you, our loyal listeners. If you enjoyed the show, please consider giving us a five-star rating wherever you get your podcasts. You can also become part of the Future of StoryTelling family by signing up for our free monthly newsletter at F-O-S-T.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts and Leisure. I hope we'll see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.