Joshua Kaplan
© Joshua Kaplan

Case #1410: The [ERROR]'s Curse

An Escape Room

Facilitator intro to the escape room

— PROJECT NAME

Case #1410: The [ERROR]'s Curse


— ROLE

Experience Designer

Programmer

Puzzle Designer

Facilitator


— DATE

March-April, 2025

In this project for my Experience Design class, my team was tasked with designing a two player cooperative escape room utilizing the Egyptian Tomb and Steampunk Kiosk sets (pictured below). As part of the project requirement, there had to be some sort of curse that the guests would try to break.


To achieve this, we had a few tools at our disposal: two screens at the kiosk for delivering clues (one of which is a touch screen), an RFID phidget sensor, three circuit phidget sensors, several touch phidget sensors, several magnet phidget sensors, and a theater lighting system.

My team quickly decided on a few things:

1) The guests should feel clever

2) The guests should feel a sense of urgency

3) There shouldn’t be a disembodied voice speaking to the guests

4) The guests shouldn’t be able to fail the escape room


This last point might be slightly contentious, so I’ll explain our reasoning. We knew that at our showcase, there would be an adequate amount of time to allow all interested guests to play. We wanted the guests to be able to enjoy the full experience and not be cut short by a timer or fail state. As a result, we chose to create urgency in another way, and did not include a time limit.


In the lore of our story, ever since this tomb was brought to the ETC (the Entertainment Technology Center, where my program is based), technology around the building started to glitch. ETC students need the tech to be functioning properly to do our work, so we enlisted a pair of curse-breaking specialists (the guests) to help. Their curse-breaking kiosk has been set up, and they’re about to get started, when suddenly the curse activates and spreads, corrupting the files on the kiosk and obscuring some of the clues (resulting in the [ERROR ERROR] text seen throughout the clues). Throughout the course of the escape room, the guests discover that the spirit of a Pharaoh lives within the tomb. It’s an ancient spirit that doesn’t understand modern technology, which is why it’s making everything glitch. The guests must calibrate the kiosk to the tomb set, identify the curse (and the spirit), purify the spirit to release it from its rage, and then set the spirit free. Each of these steps corresponds to one puzzle.


At the start of the experience—and also if the guests make three mistakes—there’s a “curse spreading” sequence. Here, the lights turn red, the eyes in the background of the tomb begin to glow, the kiosk glitches even more, and an ominous whispering sound plays. The guests must each quickly put their hands over the mouths of the sarcophagi to pacify the curse temporarily.


To complement our story and help onboard the guests, we decided to have a live facilitator (played by me) start the experience, explain a bit of the story, and subtly start the first curse spreading sequence.


Here is a walkthrough of the experience and puzzles (note: the images can only partially capture what the actual experience feels like. In particular, the lighting looks different in the actual space):


The guests enter the tomb set, where they are greeted by the facilitator.

The set of the Tomb, where the escape room takes place. In lore, this room is cursed. One player explores this room.

The steampunk kiosk that contains instructions and puzzles. One player sits here.

The tomb’s curse spreads to the kiosk. Both players need to temporarily pacify the curse by covering the mouths of the two sarcophagi. This is tutorialized by the facilitator, who initially covers one mouth and asks for help

The curse spreads in the Tomb.

The first screen shown on the lower kiosk screens. At the start, only the first task is unlocked.

First is the “Calibrate” puzzle. I like puzzles with hidden information that you have to infer. This is shown on the upper screen of the kiosk. In this case, the puzzle is cluing the guests to calibrate the kiosk to the tomb by matching the color on the kiosk with the color on the left wall of the tomb.

Flipping switches on the kiosk allows the guests to pick one of eight colors. Press matching symbols on the left wall makes that wall light up in a color. The goal of this puzzle is to make these match, three times. This uses circuit and switch phidgets.

Next is the “Identify” puzzle.

On the central wall is a magnetic beetle that guests can run over the wall. There are three symbols on this wall that will cause it to light up green when the beetle is on top of them. This uses magnet phidgets.

Once the three symbols (we call them the “weak points” of the curse) are identified, the player in the tomb must communicate them to the player on the kiosk. The kiosk player then sets the wiring based on the three symbols. This puzzle was directly inspired by the “Keypads” puzzle from “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes”

The “Purify” puzzle. The goal is to create a calming environment for the spirit. On the right wall, touching symbols would either change the color of the upper half (sky) or lower half (ground) of the wall. There were two options for each, and each option was accompanied by atmospheric sounds. This uses touch phidgets.

Four possible symbols are clued here. The first one turns the ground blue, and is wrong because drowning isn’t calming. The second one turns the ground a golden hue, and relates to the Pharaoh’s life, so is correct.

The third one turns the sky blue, and is correct.

The fourth one turns the sky red, which relates to the Pharaoh’s rage, so is incorrect.

The final puzzle is the “Absolve” puzzle, in which the spirit is released. Four small canopic jars are hidden around the room. The puzzle is to find and identify the correct one, and hold it up to the eyes. This uses an RFID phidget.

The locations of the jars and a note describing them. The correct jar must be held up to the eyes.

The puzzle clues that we must help the Pharaoh “take his final breath.” This relates to the lungs, so the jar with the baboon head is the correct one.

Victory! A sigh plays and the tomb brightens.

The overall playtime of the experience is about 20 minutes.

Here is a slightly condensed full playthrough:

Two guests playing through the experience. Slightly edited for viewing convenience.

In this project, I helped write the story and puzzles, wrote the script for the facilitator, did the facilitation, programmed all the interactions, implemented the sound, designed and programmed the lighting, made a rough sketch for the Kiosk UI, wrote the puzzle text, reset the tomb between guests, and ran playtests. One of my teammates helped with story and puzzles and did the sound design, and the other teammate designed the Kiosk UI.


In making this experience, I treated it as a state machine with the interactions as triggers that changed state. A slightly simplified version of the state machine is shown below:

A state machine for this experience

It's difficult to design puzzles that can make everyone feel clever. Some people playing had a lot of puzzle solving and escape room experience, but most of our guests had very little. Through playtesting, we refined the puzzle descriptions to make them clearer, but I think it would have taken another few rounds of playtesting to really get the descriptions to their ideal state. We also added "Look up for instructions" text to the lower kiosk screen, because we noticed that many people weren't paying attention to both screens.


Some things that worked really well:

- The live onboarding conveyed the story to players well, and taught what to do when the curse spread.

- Every group has messed up enough times to trigger the angry curse sequence, and they remember the onboarding and were able to diffuse it quickly.

- Clueing “breath” => “lungs” => “baboon” worked very well, and every group figured that out without hints.


Some things that could have been better:

- The instructions for some of the puzzles were unclear, causing people to try the wrong sequence repeatedly and not know how to proceed. This could be fixed through further refining of the instructions.

- Some of the phidgets required fuller touches than players were trying. Players sometimes touched the correct symbols, but nothing happened so they thought they did something wrong. This could potentially be fixed through adjusting how the phidgets are placed behind the walls.


Overall, I'm happy with how this experience turned out. We managed to create several impactful and memorable moments with the curse spreading and victory sequences, the puzzles made good use of the space and the available resources, and there were no glitches with the programming or operation of the experience (even though it was glitch themed!).