This site doesn’t believe in taking April 1st as an excuse to try to make fools of its readers, but it’s a good day for whimsy. For instance, see last year’s satire on freemium gaming; happily everybody has had sufficient good taste for this not to come to pass, and fingers crossed that this remains so for many more years to come.
Instead, probably less tastefully, this site proposes an exit game purity test. Your purity score starts at 100% and drops by 1% for each of the following questions to which you can truthfully answer “Yes”. Technicalities count.
1. Have you ever been in a room with a door with a lock?
2. Have you ever unlocked a door?
3. Have you ever unlocked a door by grabbing the key with your teeth and turning it because both your hands were full with shopping bags that you didn’t want to put down on the ground?
4. Have you ever picked a lock?
5. Have you ever snapped a key clean in two in a lock then had to physically unscrew the lock from the door in order to sort it out?
6. Have you ever mocked a lock after cleaning its clock?
7. Have you mutilated more keys than Uri Geller?
8. Have you ever been outside a building with an exit game?
9. Have you ever got out of the rain by standing in the doorway to an exit game without actually going in?
10. Have you ever been inside a building with an exit game?
11. Have you ever been thrown out of a building with an exit game?
12. Have you ever played an exit game?
13. Have you ever played an exit game and won?
14. Have you ever played an exit game and lost?
15. Have you ever played an exit game and come up with a weird indeterminate sort of half-victory which the staff were not expecting?
16. Have you ever taken the consequences of losing an exit game wayyy too seriously?
17. Have you ever broken a record at an exit game?
18. Have you ever smuggled a vinyl disc into an exit game for the purpose of demonstrating your commitment to convoluted prop comedy?
19. Have you got a regular exit game team?
20. Have you got more than one exit game team?
21. Have you founded more than one exit game team just so your two teams can somehow feud with each other?
22. Have you travelled a hundred miles to play another exit game?
23. Have you travelled to another country to play an exit game?
24. Have you travelled to another country to play at least eight exit games in a single day?
25. Have you ever played an exit game while not knowing more than the barest essentials of the language of the country in which you were playing?
26. Have you ever cracked a code?
27. Have you ever been cracked by a code?
28. Have you ever asked a precocious child to set you a code to break and then been blown away by the complexity of what they have set?
29. Have you ever cheated at an exit game?
30. No, really. Have you ever cheated at an exit game, just a teeny weeny bit?
31. TECHNICALITIES COUNT. In your heart of hearts, you’ve got to admit that that one time, you did that thing that wasn’t completely kosher, didn’t you?
32. Have you ever cheated on an exit game, by playing it but thinking about playing another one while you were doing so?
33. Have you ever played two exit games at once?
34. “Yo, dawg. I heard you like exit games, so I put an exit game in your exit game so you can exit a game while you exit a game.” Have you ever played a digital exit game while playing a physical exit game?
35. Have you ever played an exit game with your significant other?
36. Have you ever played an exit game with your significant other and argued about it with them for hours afterwards?
37. Have you ever brought your cat, dog or other household pet with you to play an exit game because you want them to share the fun?
38. Have you ever dreamt of an exit game?
39. Have you ever dreamt of an exit game, then woken up in the morning, written the details down and worked out if they were at all practicable?
40. Have you ever been blindfolded in an exit game?
41. Have you ever been blindfolded in an exit game and enjoyed it a bit too much?
42. Have you ever been handcuffed in an exit game?
43. Have you ever been handcuffed in an exit game and chose not to remove the handcuffs when you probably should have done?
44. Have you ever taken advantage of an exit game which doesn’t have a camera to do something you probably shouldn’t have done in an exit game?
45. Have you ever taken advantage of an exit game which does have a camera to do something you really really probably shouldn’t have done in an exit game and the fact that there was a camera only made it better?
46. Have you ever been a gamesmaster for an exit game?
47. Have you ever designed your own exit game?
48. Have you ever run an exit game inside your own house for your friends?
49. Have you ever set yourself a one-hour time limit for a domestic chore and pretended you were playing an exit game in order to make it more interesting?
50. Have you ever bought something because you thought it would be a cool addition to the exit game that you’re planning to make some day?
51. Have you ever made an exit from an exit game through an exit that was not intended?
52. Have you ever left an exit game before the end because the fire alarm had gone off?
53. Have you ever realio, trulio, not-part-of-the-game-honest been locked into a building with an exit game?
54. Have you got an exit game costume?
55. Have you got an exit game costume that you like so much that you wear it when you’re not playing exit games to help you pretend that you are?
56. Have you ever gone commando when playing an exit game?
57. Have you ever played an exit game naked?
58. Have you ever been injured in an exit game?
59. Have you ever been properly physically injured in an exit game, not just suffering a bruised ego?
60. Have you ever learnt a famous code off by heart?
61. Have you ever held a conversation in Morse just to annoy those who don’t understand it?
62. Have you ever used a blacklight in an exit game?
63. Have you ever staged a miniature blacklight rave in an exit game?
64. Have you ever made it through a laser maze in an exit game?
65. Have you ever practiced capoiera, parkour or tai chi in the expectation of having to face a laser maze in an exit game?
66. Have you ever watched a movie and thought “mmm, this would make a great exit game”?
67. Have you ever spent money on an exit game that you really shouldn’t have done?
68. Have you ever playtested an exit game?
69. Have you ever picked up people you didn’t previously know for the express purpose of playing an exit game with them?
70. Have you ever seen a ghost while playing an exit game?
71. Have you ever pranked a teammate while playing an exit game?
72. Have you ever bitten a teammate while playing an exit game?
73. Have you ever had something in an exit game named after you?
74. Have you ever named a child making a deliberate reference to an exit game?
75. Have you ever had a first date at an exit game?
76. Have you ever gained a significant other through playing an exit game?
77. Have you ever opened a lock, a lock with someone, ever opened a lock, a lock with someone you shouldn’t have opened a lock with?
78. Have you ever traded sexual favours for information about an exit game?
79. Have you ever proposed marriage, been proposed to, got married or started your honeymoon at an exit game?
80. Have you ever broken up a relationship over an exit game?
81. Have you ever spoken about exit games in public?
82. Have you ever made academic study of exit games?
83. Have you made a career out of exit games?
84. Have you made a living out of exit games?
85. Have you made a living for other people out of exit games?
86. Have you got rich from exit games?
86. TRICK QUESTION! Nobody has got rich from exit games… yet. Have you ever gone broke from an exit game?
87. Have you ever badly mistimed your need for the bathroom due to being locked in an exit game?
88. Have you ever played the same exit game more than once?
89. Have you played so many exit games that the precise details of what was in each one blur into each other?
90. Have you ever pretended you were in an exit game when really you had just lost your keys?
91. Have you ever used being locked in an exit game as an excuse for not doing something, to someone who didn’t know you would still have been able to get out?
92. Have you ever used the phrase “exit game” as innuendo while fooling around?
93. Have you ever played an exit game on your own?
94. Have you ever fantasised a bit too hard about an exit game?
95. Have you ever used “whatever happens in an exit game stays in the exit game” as an excuse?
96. Have you ever had a game exit you?
97. Have you ever escaped from an exit game with a different team than the one you went in with?
98. Have you ever lied while taking this purity test to improve your score?
99. Have you ever used this purity test as a check-list of sources of inspiration, then done something with the intent to “improve” your score on this Purity Test?
100. Are you taking this test from within an exit game right now?
No names, no pack drill, and definitely no scores, but this site has specific reason to believe that in aggregate, the industry has a purity of between 6% and 14%.