Today’s memento is an item from one of the more novel approaches to escape rooms in the area. City 13 is one of the biggest and most elaborate escape room venues in the midwest, if not the United States. They’re best known for their 4+ hour Save the City game, but Kandy Corps is quite novel as well.
The Kandy Corps is a bit of a fusion between conventional escape rooms and the more recent “challenge room” concept in which teams can roam a facility and enter various rooms to solve challenges within. All teams start Kandy Corps at the New Hire Welcome Center, but after that, the rooms can be tackled in any order.
The memento I’m sharing is the “map” of the factory listing the various rooms we needed to tackle. I wont spoil what that all builds up to, but savvy readers can figure out that there’s a little more to this tracker than just checking the boxes.
The concept has strengths and weaknesses. By separating the game into various rooms, multiple teams can be in the game at the same time without causing any problems. As someone who usually books escape rooms toward the last minute, I appreciate how that added flexibility would make it more likely to find a convenient time, vs. running into a problem when someone else has already booked the best slot of the night. This also works well from a business perspective, to allow more customers to come in.
Separating the escape room into 6+ smaller scenarios creates some differences in flow compared to conventional escape rooms. While many linear escape rooms already naturally move you through a space, it’s more apparent when you’re physically restricted to one puzzle’s area at a time. The design also necessitates that the puzzles can all be self-resetting, which limits options for how they can work. City 13 did a great job building around that constraint, but it’s still something that limits the way players interact with the space.
I enjoyed my experience at Kandy Corps and appreciate the experimentation into new approaches at escape room games.
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