Mytho-Logique

The starting point

Two rooms to create in Montpellier, in a market where escape rooms are no longer a novelty. Visitors have played rooms before. They compare.

The operator arrived with the worlds already written, and had not settled for the sector's over-used references. The first room goes down into the cellar of an Irish pub, among the Clurichauns, those of the little people who wreak havoc in the drink stores. The second plays out at night in Guadeloupe, around the Soukounian: farmers whose cattle are being drained of blood consult the village quimboiseur, who sends them to investigate a hermit neighbour.

Two folklores nobody else is using. What remained was to make them playable.

What Pix took on

A written world is not yet a room. Between the story and opening day, someone has to decide how each puzzle fires, how it resets, what it becomes when it fails, and who knows how to build it.

That is where we came in: the thinking on the mechanisms, the art direction, then the choice and the steering of the trades.

The mechanisms

Every puzzle was taken up as an object to be built, with its functions, its criteria and its requirements. One example: in the pub, players move bottles in front of symbols until they find the right combination. Behind that, we had to settle the detection, the number of correct positions, how the wiring and the system disappear into the cabinet, and the fact that nothing breaks if a player forces it.

Those three columns repeat for every puzzle in both rooms. It is the document that lets an operator run a room without its designer, and a maker build it without inventing it.

The hint system was treated as part of the set rather than a screen on the wall: a grimoire with a tablet built into it in one room, mirrors summoned by voice in the other. In both, a hint is announced by a sound and by a lighting effect, so that hard-of-hearing players get the same cue as everyone else.

The build

The result

What Pix did, exactly

The thinking on the game mechanisms, art direction, selection and steering of the trades. The worlds and the storylines were written by the operator.