Pakotarinat is a room escape company in Espoo Leppävaara starting from 9.12.2016 and in Joensuu starting from 19.10.2018. Our story began in winter 2015, when we were building the first escape rooms in Joensuu with the local operative. We hadn’t heard from escape rooms before, but we went completely nuts over them.
The whole concept intrigued us; how the themes were done, the genius and exciting ways the puzzles were built and the idea of just having fun together 🙂 After these first rooms we designed and built our own room – Crime Mystery. We have run our own room since February 2016 and it has gained quite a popularity in this region.
Our first room
Building an escape room was tough but interesting experience. We started by deciding what the theme should be and at first we based it on our own interests. Different kind of crime stories were very interesting and they even fit the room escape idea well. We also wanted to bring something more to the game and decided to add a hint of 50’s film noir to it. We designed the puzzles to be logical and functional, but finding the right time to solve the puzzles required testing. At this point we also noticed another important factor; room escapes were very new thing to most of the people (at least in this region) and with this in mind, we changed the room to be more like “get to know room escapes”. Over all, this change helped extremely, but
when we removed one problem, we encountered another one; the room needs to work fluently when there are new people playing and also, when there’s experienced players involved. To make this happen, we kept the puzzles easily approachable, but created difficulty through diversity of the puzzles. And when we finally thought our room was “done”, we encountered numerous small defects. Usually they didn’t affect game play in any way, but in some rare occasions proved problematic. The most memorable of these was one color puzzle. The solution for the puzzle was in different colors and it was important, that they doesn’t get mix up. One time we had a red-green colorblind person playing and he said he couldn’t see the colors correctly and finally we understood what was problem with the puzzle. Quite frankly, we never even thought about this kind of possibility and from now on, we’ve tried to take as many disabilities into consideration when we design our puzzles.
What now?
Even though the building process of a room is very laborious, it’s also very rewarding when the room works. After the first room, we have a lot of experience to build a room escape -room and we’re eager to build more 🙂 The last games in Joensuu are played in 26.11.2016 and after this our story continues in Espoo. We planned to keep the Crime Mystery about the same as it is now, but we might change it later to be more like “Escape room of Espoo” 🙂
Building an escape room was tough but interesting experience. We started by deciding what the theme should be and at first we based it on our own interests. Different kind of crime stories were very interesting and they even fit the room escape idea well. We also wanted to bring something more to the game and decided to add a hint of 50’s film noir to it. We designed the puzzles to be logical and functional, but finding the right time to solve the puzzles required testing. At this point we also noticed another important factor; room escapes were very new thing to most of the people (at least in this region) and with this in mind, we changed the room to be more like “get to know room escapes”. Over all, this change helped extremely, but when we removed one problem, we encountered another one; the room needs to work fluently when there are new people playing and also, when there’s experienced players involved. To make this happen, we kept the puzzles easily approachable, but created difficulty through diversity of the puzzles. And when we finally thought our room was “done”, we encountered numerous small defects. Usually they didn’t affect game play in any way, but in some rare occasions proved problematic. The most memorable of these was one color puzzle. The solution for the puzzle was in different colors and it was important, that they doesn’t get mix up. One time we had a red-green colorblind person playing and he said he couldn’t see the colors correctly and finally we understood what was problem with the puzzle. Quite frankly, we never even thought about this kind of possibility and from now on, we’ve tried to take as many disabilities into consideration when we design our puzzles. 