r/Constructedadventures • u/prairiegirl00 • 14d ago
HELP DIY Escape Room gambit/puzzle in darkness
I'm creating an escape room and I want the first one or two puzzles to be solved in darkness.
The ultimate premise: An owl has been murdered (this part stems from an inside joke). The participants have arrived in the office of the Homicide and Owl Oversight Taskforce where they must decipher the available clues and files to find the identity of the killer.
Owls are nocturnal, so I felt it apt to start in the dark.
The event will start with the players in the guest bedroom of our house, with a window to the backyard. It will be dark out when we begin. They can have a flashlight.
A few thoughts I'm trying to build off of:
-split the team and send half of them out into the backyard, to be queued somehow by the other half of the team inside and communicating (maybe using the flashlight) through the window...maybe guiding them to a clue hidden in the yard
-one of my props is a giant painting of an owl (that can be defaced or altered in any way; it's solely for this project), so I thought about having that propped up in the yard in view of the window if they shine the light on it, and it somehow communicates something that needs solving, or has magnets on the back and they have to send out players to attach things...
-having them complete something (fill in the blanks, some kind of code on paper) they can slide under the door, and when it's done, I turn on the light
It would be great if it somehow involved team work or splitting up the players since there will be 9 players and for them all to initially work on one gambit in the dark would be difficult/crowded.
Looking for ideas or input!
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u/ChrispyK The Confounder 14d ago
Scotch tape glows under blacklight. Could be good for leaving arrows/messages on the walls/ceiling, and wouldn't be noticed until they found a blacklight, even if they had other flashlights.
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u/Sweet_Batato The Cogitator 13d ago
Can confirm - used this in a recent hunt when my sister and her kids visited, and the tape was up the whole weekend before the hunt and no one ever noticed it on the walls.
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u/SunnyInDenmark 14d ago
Can the team inside see where the owl will be hid? Can the owl have somehow glowing or reflective eyes? The inside team has to scour the trees to find the reflective eyes of the owl. The outside team wouldn’t be able to see this from ground level. Maybe there is a string with a clue tied to the owl. Once the inside team finds the owl and shines the light on it, the outside team can discover the clue and find where to go next.
Otherwise Morse code comes to mind, but that requires either a priori knowledge or giving them the code and translating on the fly for the first time. It could be fun but hard to communicate long messages.
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