Two up, two down?

by Eric Jones [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsA two-up, two-down former quarryman’s cottage by Eric Jones [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Some good news, some bad news. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

A contact observes that if you go to the web site for Escape Land of London and click through the “Bookings” link, the actual bookings page currently says “Sorry, this business is currently not taking any bookings. Please contact the business directly for more information“. While the site’s Facebook hasn’t been updated since early August, the most recent TripAdvisor review dates from last August. It’s the booking page that’s really worrying, though. Thelogicescapesme.com found lots to like and it was also something of a Thinking Bob favourite.

Likewise, consider iLocked, look at its bookings page and observe that every day has every game marked “not available”. No recent progress on its Facebook page or recent reviews, either.

Now these aren’t actually the worst signs. It could be something as responsible as the site owners taking an indefinite break and trying to set expectations appropriately. It might reflect the rooms being renovated. It might reflect the businesses moving location. Or it might reflect the worst and it’s not immediately obvious which of these fates is the case. This site will be following the case.

Now that’s out of the way, in much happier news, a very popular site has suggested that they will be opening two new locations. The identity of the site and its locations must surely remain under embargo for now but it is safe to comment that they have recently openly hinted on social media at a major announcement coming soon, and also that the site has set up some social media for those new locations. Exit Games UK imagines that the metaphorical cat will, happily, officially be out of the bag in a matter of days at latest – in fact, a business which is co-located with one of the future locations has already announced it – but there’s enough to chew on here without repeating anything that might still be off the record. (Please don’t post details in the comments until they’re officially released by the site itself.)

Definite good news against possible bad news? Not such a bad day after all!

Now open in London: iLocked

iLocked logoAnother tip of the hat to Ken, the undisputed champion of finding new exit games in London, for this one.

It’s of at least vaguely academic interest to observe that there are a number of – at the risk of an inaccurate term – national traditions in exit games. This site welcomes that so many people have come from countries which have greater traditions of exit games to the UK and brought established exit game practice with them. It’s definitely possible to identify (and these names may be inaccurately specific where something more vague would be more appropriate) a Hungarian tradition and a Chinese tradition.

Now many exit games have been started by people who are neither of these, but the distinction is more about where the games you learnt from originate – so if you’ve played games in Budapest and then started your own here, you’re perpetuating the Hungarian tradition at one remove. If you’ve played games in the UK that come from the Hungarian tradition at one remove and then started your own, you’re still perpetuating the Hungarian tradition, quite possibly blending it with experiences from games from other traditions as well.

It’s not as if these traditions are all that different, but if you follow a few different exit game blogs from different countries, you can start to draw very rough patterns in where different hinting mechanisms, room contents, room sizes and even difficulty levels are most common, and how some early and successful games in one country can set players’ expectations for other games in the same country. There are a few instances where it might be more appropriate to suggest a tradition comes from one multinational brand and thus is spread about the world, rather than a particular country.

All that said, iLocked is a new exit game in London which does something different; an early impression was that it seemed to follow the Russian tradition of exit games. This claim was based on some early Cyrillic-alphabet tweets that the site has made, observed commonality between the site’s early social media followees and at least the implication that the site may have different one-room games in different parts of the city. Would this make it a single location with many games, or potentially multiple one-room branches? Er, not sure yet.

((Edited to add, May 25th: See the comments below; the site draws its inspirations from games in many countries, including Russia but also including many others, and has a style all its own, hence some slight editing above.))

So what makes this tradition Russian? Visit the Claustrophobia brand’s web site and observe how so many different of the games there have different addresses within the city; to see this more visually, click on the “карта квестов” – map of quests – link, and see all the different locations indicated. Furthermore, see how far the model has been replicated in other cities. Perhaps this is an artefact of a single brand, because there certainly are locations in Russia in other brands which do have many games at a single central location, but “Russian” is as good a starting-point as any for an identifier – at least, until a proper researcher gets their hands on it!

Humanities lesson aside, so what about this new site? It has one game in its first location, “Drunken office morning“. This is a sixty-minute game for teams of two to five, with the charge including VAT ranging from £60 to £105 per team depending on the size. The story runs as follows: “Saturday morning you woke up in a locked office after the birthday party. Do not despair! Turn your logical thinking on and together, as a team, get out of this room full of secrets. Guess who is missing colleague and why he left you locked? Solve the puzzles and communicate with each other. Have lots of fun!

Further games are promised to be coming soon!

((Edited to add, May 21st:)) Maybe not the first from the Russian tradition after all! An article in Russia Beyond The Headlines suggests that Lock’d brought the Russian tradition to London first; the …founders of Lock’d ((are)) both Moscow State University graduates, one a cryptographer, the other a physicist. На здоровье!