Projects > Special projects > Une rentrée pas comme les autres
Une rentrée pas comme les autres
Une rentrée pas comme les autres
Une rentrée pas comme les autres
Release year: 2018
Production time: Couple weeks
A few weeks before the start of my second year at the Robert Schuman University Institute of Technology (IUT), I was commissioned by the Student Union (BDE) to create an escape game for the first-year students’ orientation day.
Participants begin the escape game by watching a video. In it, they learn that a company named “A Typical Company” (Une Entreprise Lambda) has accidentally poisoned them with an odorless, colorless gas. The antidote is inside a box secured by a padlock, and they must find the code before the poison takes effect.
Objective: Find a way to open the box and retrieve the cure.
Organization: Students are divided into 9 groups. Each group plays the same escape game in a different classroom, accompanied by a member of the Student Union (BDE) acting as the game master.
The escape game features three main puzzles: one based on observation, one on searching, and one on logic. These can be solved simultaneously and in any order. Each completed puzzle reveals part of a Gmail account password, as well as a number linked to a color, information needed to determine the combination for the box’s padlock.
Once the password is found, students log in to the Gmail account and search through the emails for the final clues. They will find the last digit of the combination as well as an image that must be decoded to determine the correct sequence of the four digits. These final pieces of information allow them to unlock the padlock, open the box, and win the game.
Producer, artist, game designer: ROCHOTTE Lilian
Game masters, video: The “OD’IC” Student Union
What I did
Create a game that meets diverse objectives
- To entertain and encourage cooperation among people who do not know each other.
- To bring together a group of 90 first-year Information and Communication students.
- To create an escape game that could be replicated nine times (i.e., run in nine separate rooms) on a very limited budget.
- To design the game for teams of around ten students, ensuring there were enough simultaneous tasks to keep everyone engaged.
- To brief the game masters.
- To strike a sensible balance regarding difficulty (not too hard, given that the students were unlikely to be escape game experts, yet not too simple, so that there is still a challenge).