Box Puzzle Feedback and Revise

Observation

The Intended Experience

for the puzzle, we intended to let the players first find the boxes and puzzles from the mailboxes. Then they will focus on the arrangement of the boxes based on the color and number provided, as well as look through the riddle and figure out the first word in each line composed “key is under the table”. 

They will easily figure out the EMPTY boxes by 1) the 6th is the same as the 2nd and it is not bad 2) listening to the silent boxes when they shake them. Then they can know the 3rd and 7th are BAD as “bad can only be right of the EMPTY”. Then, that line also means “BAD can not be at the left of EMPTY” so the GOOD boxes can only be 1st and 5th. 

Also, players can use the last line “MAP can not be the rightmost” to figure out the 1st is the TOKEN, and the 5th is the MAP. 

The Playtest Experience

During the playtest, the three players first seek the boxes and arrange them according to the color indications. Then they follow the clue of the first word to get the keys under the table. 

After that, they focus on the riddle and spend some time trying to figure out that the 2nd and the 6th are EMPTY boxes. After that, one player asked if she can use the keys to unlock the 5th and 2nd boxes (there is a bug here that we do not specify which key is the MAP key and which key is the TOKEN key), we answer her the 5th box is open and they take out the MAP piece. However, after that, they are stuck on the riddle and decide to solve the next puzzle and assemble the map together. 

Prior to finishing the last part, they are missing the key tokens so they go back to the box puzzle and try to solve it. After some time they give up on the puzzle and try to unlock the boxes one by one. When they try the last one, they unlock the box and get the TOKENs. 

Experience Evaluation and Difference 

The playtest experience turned out quite different from what we have thought about. The largest unexpected thing is they spend a long time trying to understand and get the meaning of the riddle. Also, maybe the riddle instruction is not clear enough that they try more on finding out the boxes with fear, which are the BAD ones. 

The part that matches our expectation is when they get stuck on the riddle itself, they just try one by one to find the correct answer because they are just traditional locks - nothing prevents them from inserting the key one by one. 

Player Feedback and Reflection

Concise, Accuracy, and Simple: 

The first problem is about the actual riddle design. The current riddle is a bit unclear about the objectives of the players. This ends up when the players try to find BAD boxes during the playtest rather than the MAP and TOKEN ones. They comment that it will be better to rephrase the riddle to be clearer and more accurate. Regarding the players of the escape room being younger children that may not have much logic experience as today’s playtesters, we also should consider narrowing down the variances from the riddle and keep that simpler. 

Story Theme Coherence: 

They also comment on finishing act 2 to act 3, since it has been a long time since they are not interacting with the ghost that they nearly forget its existence of it. That is a key point of the starting point of act 3 the puzzle here should reflect on some parts of the previous player's experiences and should remind them about the ghost. We have designed the boxes to be time capsules (such manufacturers did not take part in the paper prototype as a matter of time and production) the ghost left to himself when it was a human before. We should definitely include such themes in the boxes design and riddle design., 

One of the good things they point out is interactivity - if players do not know which ones are empty ones, they can just shake the boxes and get the answer. We designed some “cheat” possibilities like this one to let players at least have the most basic way to solve the puzzle, as long as such a way should take more time and more work (such as trying to lock one by one). However, we may consider shaking the boxes to be a nice and smart way to examine if it is empty or not as this is the natural affordance for people to think of. 

Accessibility: 

Duncan points out, instead of the playtesters, that the color may not be a good way to design some puzzles as it will not work for those color blind people. He comments that there should at least be 2 ways for a clue to be solved, such as a combination of shapes and colors. These are some parts we have not yet considered yet but if a color-blind person is going to play the puzzle, he/she will have no idea what the riddle is about and therefore be unable to finish the puzzle. We will reiterate the puzzle to design the riddle on box shapes and box positions, whereas position will be their first step to start the puzzle and shapes are more obvious and accessible than colors. 

Affordances:

One part we did not think about was when they are finding out the boxes with fear rather than the MAP and TOKENs. On one hand, this is because the clarity of the riddle is not enough for a concrete goal to find out; on the other hand, players may want to find boxes with fear to help the ghost to eliminate them. One of the ways we considered to address such an issue was there would be 2 keys while there were 3 BAD boxes, however, that would not be that obvious. The possible way to speak out clearly is that the thing you want is TOKENs and MAP. 

Revised Plan

The logic and core gameplay of the box puzzle will not change so much that we have to make some adjustments to make the experience more affordable and clearer. The major changes will be these topics:

• the instructions from the riddle: such as some clarity and concision. 

• to make the empty box “really empty” - can reduce the difficulty and add more interactivity. So there will only be 5 locked boxes among all 7 boxes. 

• the puzzle has to be more consistent with the theme of the ghost. We are considering pointing out the idea that these boxes are time capsules the ghost left here before. There should be more patterns and indications on boxes to remind them about the theme (maybe parchment paper, ancient weird patterns, the shape of the boxes) 

• we remove the component of the color that is somehow confusing and not accessible as being prompt in the riddle; instead, we use the shape of the boxes as the indicator in the riddle. We want to add more diversity to the boxes (as well as patterns, even ghost voices) to let players recognize they are time capsules and keep the consistency of the whole story. 

• update the instructions to be more clear: the instructions at the back side of the riddle should say the goal of players is to find out the MAP and the TOKENs in these boxes and avoid boxes with fear. 

The concept sketch: