Creative Works showcased its Autonomous Escape Room at the IAAPA Attractions Expo in Orlando, UK, this year.
One of the most costly aspects of running an escape room is employing a games master to oversee the gameplay and give the players clues. As well as this they generally reset the room after play as well. However, with Creative Works’ autonomous escape room, where the puzzles are digital rather than purely physical props.
“So the game master is able to run three or four games at once using this system which would be impossible with a traditional games room and they can just hit a simple button at the end of play,” said Russ Van Natta, vice president of sales.
The games are designed to be 30 minutes rather than an hour, which has been the general length of these amusements to date. “But this is aimed at family entertainment centres, not stand alone sites so the operators can go through twice the number of customers with this time frame. As well as high throughput, this also means less labour costs for the operator,” he said.
The first game for this format is a zombie theme escape room, but by the end of 2019 the company intends to have five games applicable to this setup.
