Home escape room games remain popular, but are often limited to the dining table or a single room. Escape Your House from Identity Games changes that, because with this game you turn your entire house into an escape room. We were also allowed to experience this ourselves and you can read the review here.
Photo: Joost Klein Middelink
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Escape Your House offers six missions where you have to solve various puzzles before you can finally escape. That escape is symbolized by a physical lock that you have to fix on an outside door with a key. You have to put that key in a room where you come later in the game. Then you put a certain number of cards in all kinds of rooms in your house and you can start. You will have to determine beforehand which rooms you use for this. For example, each room must be accessible from each other. If you don’t have that many rooms, you can divide parts of a room into spaces.
Each mission is divided into a few missions where you need information spread over several rooms. Players can stand by each card to call out information to each other, or players can move back and forth with the knowledge. In either case, you often move between rooms to collect all the parts. This gave us the feeling of a real escape room, although the atmosphere was of course not adapted for the setting.
The disadvantage of Escape Your House is immediately clear when setting up, because the game needs ten spaces. This means that you will need almost all the spaces in the average terraced house. You will need the living room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathroom and more. You can create multiple rooms in a room for puzzles, but the concept requires that you cannot view each other’s cards, so most rooms have room for just one ‘room’.
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The missions are well thought out and the questions require reasonable cooperation between the players. In this way, it knows how to bring the escape room experience into your home. Each of the six challenges lasts 15 minutes, which is a nice introduction to the concept, but we often felt we had just started as we were already approaching the end. Some longer experiences may be possible in the future, but this also makes it much more complex to put in a box.
Some assignments are actually a simple riddle, but to solve them you need information from cards that are in different ‘rooms’. By communicating with each other you arrive at the answer. Other cards require a physical element, such as furniture, water, or other items. This ensures that you should also have that (easily) available, something the box doesn’t tell you. Still, that’s a nice addition, because normally you have to do something physically in an escape room. Other assignments actually felt more like math, so this didn’t seem like much of a challenge. Anyway, it was a great mix.
Ultimately, Escape Your House a very fun variation on home escape rooms where the experience is more like the real thing. The puzzles are sometimes a bit simple and because the assignments only take 15 minutes, we sometimes had the feeling that we had only just started. Still, with six challenges, it offers enough entertainment to have smaller escape experiences from home.
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