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 remotely controls a ‘rat’ and sees the room through a camera.
The lab assistant can physically interact with the objects, while the rat can reach places the assistant cannot, collecting information and delivering items. The latter can play the game while seated, providing partial accessibility to players with mobility impairments.
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 (parttime)
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, allowing cooperation between players with varying mobility.
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.