Caves of Caneen Anouncement

October 15, 2024 Calvin Kammer

This is the first post about our new escape game, Caves of Caneen!

Welcome to the Caves of Caneen!

Well, how did we get here?

This game has been about 6 weeks worth of effort, with a good chunk of that time being spent on moving out of our first location into our spot at 7718 N First St.

But now I am excited to announce our newest game, the Caves of Caneen!

Originally back in August we had planned to reopen our doors with a brand new tavern-themed escape room experience. This game isn’t that! Tales in the Bloated Toad is still on our horizon, we just need something of a stop-gap before we get to completely original rooms. We had completed the framework for the gamedesign, the frame for the bar, and the frame for the set when the doors to our old place closed and we had two weeks to move everything out. We couldn't exactly open on frames.

How do we work this?

It was a miscalculation on our end for how fast it would take to create an entire escape room space from effectively ground-up coupled with closing and moving everything to the new location.

I came to the conclusion that we needed to reuse our fan-favorite rooms to get us up and cash-flow positive as soon as possible. King’s Keep had an awesome set with unique puzzles, and Clancey’s Lodge was a fan-favorite I didn’t really want to leave behind.

Under the rocks and stones

Back in September I wrote as much that King’s Keep and Clancey’s Lodge would be remastered and set in the same universe as our new rooms. That was the plan then, but I knew it would ultimately alienate our core players from wanting to try our new game if it wasn’t really new.

Between KK and CL, we figured it would be faster to remake CL than KK. CL had significantly fewer electronic puzzles, and our skills with microcontrollers are far superior than they were when we first started 5 years ago. CL remastered was going to be our first game at the new location!

Each puzzle in CL was scrutinized to be remade in the new medieval fantasy setting. Nearly all of them had to be changed to a degree where it was unrecognizable from the original. At that point, why not just go the extra mile and make something new? I had some things to think about while we built the set.

We set about our efforts to quickly create carved walls out of styrofoam. It was a lengthy and tiresome ordeal, but the end result was phenomenal. I don’t recommend anyone ever doing it at the scale we did it. In the end it came out great!

While we had the set going, my mind was with the story. Each escape game of our move our needle in a new, interesting way. Or at least I prefer to think so!

Here comes the twister

With this game, we had the chance to fully focus on telling the story using a game mechanic from my favorite puzzle game of all time; Case of the Golden Idol. In brief, the game has snapshots of life for you to explore and discover. Each scene/level is a single snapshot, frozen in time. Within the details of the snapshot, you can learn more about the characters and the events leading up to the mystery of the level (it’s always someone died). By interacting with the characters and environment, players add underlined words they find, and eventually can recreate the story using a variant of mad-libs. The game has two sections: exploration of the scene, and then deduction of the story through the words they’ve found.

I adapted using these “word-blocks” and “storyblock” in our escape room, and it’s created something of story! Of course, it will make the most sense by playing the game.

What I adore about this mechanic is that for the right player, a proverbial "Lore-Master", will get their rocks off reading about everything this room has to offer. Other players may never care to read into the story, and instead prefer to focus on just the puzzles! These mechanic allows for one game to cater to multiple player archetypes. The added benefit to it being a bonus final puzzle, is that if players have extra time at the end and haven't solved the storyblock, they still have an excellent reason to enjoy the room, rather than rushing out as soon as they can.

The room looks cool. I really want people to stay in there and enjoy themselves!

With this mechanic came something I am worried about groups of 2 will struggle with. Reading.

There is a good amount of required reading in this room. For smaller groups it seems they can get lost in the details if too much is thrown at them. Thankfully that is what testing and patient friends are for. By the time this game is actually played by real people (I don’t count my friends and fam as real) I expect the kinks in story placement will be ironed out. The top requests have been adding an underlines to sections, which is easy enough.