Ratlabs Escape Room
Overview
Welcome to Ratlabs, an advanced research facility that focuses on rat experiments. But trying out the newest invention on himself, the professor accidentally turned himself into a rat! Can you open the safe that contains the antidote before the professor stays a rat forever?
In this escape room, two players work together. One player, the lab assistant, is physically present in the room, and the other plays as a ‘rat’ and sees the room through a camera.
My contributions
I worked on the general concept, most of the puzzles and the layout and setup of the room. I also directed and edited the trailer.
Date/Period:
dec 2022 – jan 2023
Project type:
Student project
Tools I used:
Miro (for brainstorming)
Team:
Loïs van den Berg
Tjerk Weijens
Paul Brandstetter
Timo Dijkstra
Amy van den Brink
Result
Trailer:
Because of privacy, the faces of the participants have been blurred
Photo’s:
Process
The goal was to create a (prototype of a) hybrid game: something with both a technological aspect and a physical aspect. We quickly settled on wanting to create a co-op game, with one player doing something physically and the other interacting remotely.
When creating the puzzles, we mainly focused on the connection between the human and the rat: what can the human do that the rat can’t, and vice versa?
There was a big emphasis on finding the sweet spot regarding the difficulty of the puzzles: hard enough to create satisfaction upon solving it, but not too hard to a point where it becomes extremely frustrating. So we did a lot of playtesting, both with very early prototypes as well as more fleshed out versions.