Collaborative digital-physical adventure / puzzle

• The game's Training Mission and Mission 1: »Central Station« can be played for free.
• Later missions are available as in-app purchases ($0.99 each).
• Missions vary in their level of difficulty and their duration, most are ca. 30 minutes.
• Five missions (»Central Station«, »Terminal«, »Elevator«, »Rollercoaster«, and »Subway«) can be played right now, more will be available soon.

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Escape Team is a digital-physical puzzle adventure. While it does require a mobile device running the Escape Team app, that's not where the action is.

Before playing, players print out a PDF document (a free download from www.escape-team.com) for their mission. It contains the missions' puzzles, which require logical and creative thinking, as well as folding, cutting, drawing and glueing.

The Escape Team app provides the game's thrilling audio narrative, its gripping soundtrack and a merciless countdown. Also, it serves as the »game master« (checking the puzzles' solutions through a PIN pad). Nonetheless, the real action happens between the players, who cut, fold and draw, together and on real paper, in order to finish their mission in time.

Many of Escape Team's puzzles require close cooperation between players: Escape Team is a collaborative game in which the whole team joins forces to solve the maniac's puzzles before the bomb goes off.

Too often, mobile gaming means playing alone together. Escape Team seeks to go another path: using technology to make us interact more with each other.

Bridging the digital and the physical world appeared to be a promising approach — but not in the sense of Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality, which tend to isolate one single player. Rather, we sought to enrich a deeply haptic, physical experience with a bit of digital spice.

The first versions of Escape Team were utterly boring, and, according to first user feedback, felt like »a math test« (which not everybody enjoys, surprise). We kept working on it, it took us some time — but we were able to develop puzzles that make use of paper's full potential: cutting, drawing and folding as a collaborative puzzle adventure experience.

Escape Team is a game by Hemmert UG (haftungsbeschränkt), which is run by Sarah-Carina and Fabian Hemmert. Fun for the whole family!

Sarah's background is in education. She is a passionate storyteller, voice actress, puzzle architect and an expert for fine-tuning a learning curve that maintains the balance of challenge and fun, ensuring an experience of »flow«.

Fabian is a professor for Interface Design at the University of Wuppertal. He wrote his PhD thesis about devices that bridge the digital and the physical (which he also presented at TED). After writing his first computer games in high school (the ability to code was considered »cool«, back then!), Fabian worked for Nintendo and Marvel Comics.

More Information and other projects.

Can't this be done without the printing part?

No. Cutting, folding and drawing on physical paper are at the heart of Escape Team's concept. During the development, this question came up a lot of times (e. g. »Could we use a 'digital' paper thing, on a tablet or so?«), but we wanted to build a game that happens in the real world, between people who do not stare at a screen.



Can I play Escape Team alone?

In theory, you could — we do not recommend it, though. Escape Team is, which may come as a surprise to you, about being a team! (It isn't, to be honest, actually about escaping from somewhere. That's why we had to put you into the »Escalation Prevention Entity« — for short: ESCAPE!).



I have a great idea for a puzzle!

Cool! We're all ears! Drop us a line at ideas@escape-team.com, we're curious to hear it!

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Fabian Hemmert
fabian@hemmert.eu

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