Post Mortem of "The Exorcism of A Writeloudly's Clock"
A.K.A. I Constructed an Escape Room Activity for Halloween Just to See If I Could
Pre-Halloween Notes
There’s a concept of free energy in science. Simply put, the amount of energy available during a process. I’ve latched on to it when describing my creative work endeavors. Free energy in this sense is the amount of effort I’m willing to put into something after I do all my responsibilities. And one of the reasons I like my job as a technical writer is that it offers a pretty decent baseline of creative free energy.
This year was weird though in that all of the software developers I usually work with were pulled to work on a project in an entirely different area of the company, so I had significantly less thing to do at work this cycle. But like water fills spaces, I find ways to pour my excess energies into vectors represented by metaphorical jars of light (a bastardized sentiment that is currently breaking narrative although not causality, but we’re going to get there eventually).
Now two distinct things happened in September.
One of my best friends, Brooke Husic, was working on a puzzle project.
One of my other best friends, Steenz, was in the throes of ensuring SLICE 2024 happened.
Now the key takeaways here are:
Brooke asked me to test me some stuff.
Steenz is the usual host for friend group related activities, but between NYCC and SLICE, they didn’t really have the bandwidth to host people for Halloween.
I had a lot more free energy than I thought. A lot more.
So, I volunteered to host Halloween this year and I started testing things for Brooke. And I can’t into specifics, but the gist of it was that there was a meta-puzzle within the puzzles I tested for Brooke.
And then I got an idle idea in my office because of this meta-puzzle. Could I make an escape room? Our friend group has incorporated PuzzMo into our daily rounties. Two of them really like jigsaw puzzles. Having a puzzle related activity could be cool for Halloween.
And then I looked at the fire safe I keep documents in and the smaller safe I keep my passport in, and eyeballed it and went “I bet the smaller safe could fit into the bigger safe.” And it did.
And then I walked out to my bedroom and looked at the bluetooth speaker and went “I bet the speaker could fit into the smaller safe.” And it did.
And then at that point, the question was not “could I make an escape room” but “how am I going to build an escape room?” And I do two things really well, and that’s making slide decks and making plans that I accept will change when I actually get in the weeds of doing the damn thing.
So I created a folder called “The Exorcism of the Unknown” in my Google Drive, made a Planning Doc and started rambling.
Now, way back in February, Generative AI was involved with a Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory experience and perhaps the only good thing that ever came out of Generative AI was a fictitious character called “THE UNKNOWN” and I said way back in February (or maybe March) that I was going to be the Unknown for Halloween. And because that was set, that the original idea for the premise of the the “escape room.”
Now the end product was never going to be an escape room strictly speaking, but rather a series of puzzles to stop a beating heart. There was a whole possession of the unknown. I was gonna dress up the safe to look like a corpse. Started iterating through these things, but the central goal was “turn off the speaker in the safe within the safe.”
Made up a dream list of supplies, started planning puzzles. And then very quickly as I was designing puzzles for my friends, I had this thought was “am I thinking too much about this? Am I doing too much?” And the answer to the former is no, the latter is probably, but as I started sharing this idea with my other friends who would not be attending, their excitement confirmed that I was probably doing the correct amount of work.
So then I bought things and the things weren’t exactly to the specifications I originally intended, so then I pivot the scale, the solutions, the set dressings. Instead of doing the Unknown, I decided to lean into the fact that when I moved into this house five years ago, the old owners gifted me their mother’s favorite clock, a clearly haunted item, and thus it a convoluted narrative involving the Unknown became a personal one involving a little bit of lore of A Writeloudly, the name of my house (it’s the opposite of a speakeasy), which felt more correct as the puzzles were bespoke.
The one thing that did stay consistent between iterations was that as the team solved puzzles, they would find puzzle pieces that would became the individual puzzles that would provide the combination for the inner safe.
Then it became a matter of planning out of different types of puzzles. Being friends with Brooke meant I was always going to end making a crossword. I riffed off one of the puzzles she had me test as well. And then I rounded out the set with a nonogram, or as I remembered it a Pic-a-Pix.
One of my artistic aspirations is “what is something only you could do” (or perhaps, “what is something only you would do”) which also translates to puzzle making, and a sentiment Brooke impressed upon of “who’s your audience?” Brooke’s always had a knack for impressing key concepts onto me tracing all the way back to freshmen year when she explained special relativity with a metaphor involving jars of light representing three directions and time (I told you we’d get there) and how energy spent going in a direction meant less energy being available going through other directions and time.
And my audience were my closest friends, so of course I’m going to fill the puzzles with in jokes and their favorite bits of pop culture and the names of all our cats.
It was a whole thing. And even after I settled on the solutions, I had to make spot edits to the jigsaw because my mock up solution in Google Slides didn’t quite translate to the physical copy. I became concerned about making sure there were plenty of signposts to solve the puzzles (perhaps too concerned). I figured out a way to get everyone’s favorite candies involved to. I planned to construct several Japanese paper toys only to realize I did not that much free energy so I stuck with the most important one (the ghost).
Throughout this whole process, I kept my activities completely secret. Vaguely alluding to it to the friend group and providing a single completely unhelpful image.
I kept some folks up to date on my inner machinations. I got to explain my “activity” to friends of friends which felt good to verbalize. And at some point the voice that kept going “are you doing too much” finally shut up.
How Does One Design Bespokely
“The Exorcism of A Writeloudly’s Clock” is comprised of the following components
A letter lock with a fixed combination that I had to design a round
A cryptex that I originally hoped had would have seven letters, but instead had six.
Three 30 piece jigsaw puzzles that are available in three different stages that themselves are also puzzles that act as the base for the final answer.
Now originally, the letter lock was supposed to ALIEN and cryptex was supposed to ROMULUS, but that had to go out the window.
Outside limitations of not being able to change the configuration of meant I had to get creative. So for the letter lock, I decided to take some cues from the Periodic table. I made sure I had a reference guide so they didn’t strictly need their phones to solve.
For the cryptex, I decided to go with a number as the code, and then provided multiple seeds. Six different indicators of the answer: Chemical notation, tarot, and “alchemical bags.” Was this too much? I don’t know, I’m writing this part before Halloween. This is something I had means to playtest given it’s designed with a hyper specific audience in mind.
This if fully evident in the crown of jigsaws, where I had fully liberty to customize the experience. This meant designing a crossword whose clues were specifically designed for the group. This meant being obtuse with the nonogram’s numbering schema. This meant curating some pop culture iconography out of my friend’s favorite movies and television shows.
And then I got cutesy with some hex code to round things out.
One of the key things I tried to keep in mind as my first ever “escape room” experience was providing redundant solutions. There were many clues on how to get the necessary information.
Notes from Halloween and After
At 5:30PM on Halloween, I set everything up for the presentation and made sure everything still worked as intended. For the most part, it did, but I did have to make some adjustments and then had to reset every thing at 6:30PM because the bluetooth speaker disconnected from the tablet because I let it idle, but everything was set by 7:15PM.
At 7:45PM, the festivity actively began.
The crew quickly made work of the puzzles working through multiple channels, opening all the containers and discovering goodies and piecing together why certain things were on the table.
All in all, it took the team about 35 minutes to excise the ghost.
In my notes, the ghost’s was Liza (a riff on the house’s previous owner’s real name). The crew christened them Tokei, Japanese for watch. Tokei currently resides in my house, a friendly ghost now. The once haunted clock is now hanging in the kitchen.
When asked how this compared to an actual escape room, the consensus between me and Kat (the only one who had done something similar before) was that it was a touch easier and streamlined. We then got word our friend Fleet was inbound from work, so Steenz quickly reset the exorcism quickly so he could run through it. He managed to do so with help in about 15 minutes. The secondary consensus after that was that this was a new Halloween tradition and it was expected that I come up with something for next year.
I guess we’re ending the month keeping in line with that “when you’re good at something, your reward is to do it more” mentality from last newsletter.
Anyways, I’ve discovered that there is a limited to substack’s email length, and this will have to be it for this week. Until next time friends.