The Quest for the Best Escape Room is Over. For Now. (Q&A)
We check in with Rich Bragg, founder of the Top Escape Rooms Project
This year a group of 70 escape room enthusiast were brought together to suss out what are the best escape room and escape room companies in the world.
The result the Top Escape Rooms Project, and its accompanying Enthusiasts’ Choice Award (TERPECA).
The project is the brainchild of Rich Bragg, a serious escape room player who has participated in “567 escape rooms and 269 puzzle hunts in North America and Europe.”
We caught up with Rich via the mystery of email.
No Proscenium (NP): What was the inspiration for making a list of the top games pooled from the experience of the top players?
Rich Bragg (RB): The main inspiration was that there have been several other attempts to identify the best escape rooms in the US and in every case, the results just didn’t make sense to me based on my own experience playing many of the same rooms/companies being ranked, and every enthusiast I talked to had similar reactions. The problem stems primarily from the fact that all previous attempts had used open internet voting, and companies that spent a lot of time marketing to their players would do well in those polls, regardless of whether the companies were deserving or not.
I felt that without a tremendous amount of effort I could create a far better list, not just constrained to the US, by asking the large pool of enthusiasts out there which games should be included, and how they compare to one another. I spent some time thinking about the best way to go about doing this, and once I established a critical mass of people willing to participate and a methodology to extract meaningful results, the project was off and running.
NP: What went into the “jury selection” process?
RB: The vast majority of participants were recruited from a fairly popular Slack group dedicated to escape rooms that has many of the most experienced escape room enthusiasts in North America, Europe, and Australia. Basically, I allowed anyone on Slack that wanted to participate and was willing to put their name in the credits. Then we also reached out to a handful of other enthusiasts in Europe that were fairly prominent and had played many games. The key to making this work well is that we needed a good number of people that have played a lot of games in lots of different countries, to make sure we had data that could help compare the relative strengths of the different markets.
NP: Were there any surprising trends amongst the best of the best, or does variety rule?
RB: I actually expected that most of the rooms that would make the top of the list would not include rooms that don’t appeal to a variety of players, like horror rooms. But in fact, we did get quite a variety! I think one thing that was interesting is that I believe the vast majority of winning rooms and companies were ones that are privately owned (i.e. not part of any major chains) and have a relatively small number of rooms. It suggests that the owners that are really focused on creating great games first and foremost are going to do better in this kind of poll than rooms designed more for scalability and mass market appeal.
NP: What do YOU, personally, look for in an escape room?
RB: To me, the best escape rooms are about the experience and immersion first and foremost, but other than that there is no one thing that I look for. If a room can cause me to have some kind of strong emotion, whether that’s awe, surprise, excitement, or even sadness or fear, it is going to stick with me a lot more. I am a huge puzzler, too, so I certainly enjoy a well designed puzzle and definitely prefer rooms with a good puzzle flow, but strong puzzles are only part of the equation for me, and a really immersive room with just passable puzzles will usually impress me more than a standard office space with amazing puzzles. I can (and do!) get great puzzles in playing puzzle hunts, so I don’t need escape rooms to fulfill all aspects of that particular passion for me.
Check out the full list at the Top Escape Rooms Project.
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