The Sweet Escape
Family Escape Game
Client
Science North operates a science themed family escape room and is Northern Ontario's most popular tourist attraction. The snowflake buildings are connected by a rock tunnel, which passes through a billion-year-old geologic fault. This fault line was not known to be under the complex when the site was originally selected, and was discovered only during the construction of the building in the early 1980s. Inside the main building, hanging from the ceiling, is a 20-metre fin whale skeleton, recovered from Anticosti Island.
An agency of the provincial government of Ontario, Science North is overseen by the provincial Ministry of Culture.
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The Science North team asked us to re-conceive their permanent escape room to give it a whole new story and puzzles.
A significant design restraint was to re-use as many props from their previous escape room and limit new props to in-house fabrication.
The game also needed to be family friendly, engaging to a wide age-range as well as parents.
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We chose a theme relating to bee colony collapse, which tied into their local research activity and history.
Due to the wide age range of their attendees, we created several difficulty settings for this game. During reset time before each round it could be quickly adjusted to the play level of incoming teams.
A particular challenge was designing for the intense beating each prop in a game for kids would take!
We also spent time on-site with the team that would operate the game, finalizing the set-up and training the team.
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The final game is intensely popular with visiting families!
Years later the game is still running so — no spoilers!
