#;research

The Train by Ivan Chuang (Link)

This game had been running around between my friends back in Singapore and I looked into it. It’s a very surreal game between supposedly different worlds and discussing destiny. The game itself is very simple, you talk to a girl that tells you you have to make the right choice in order to see her again and go home. You then head to the train and have to go onto the train and find a way home, it’s a text based game where you simply just click a few choices to find details and decide what would happen to you. It took me maybe 3 tries before I caught on what was happening and managed to get a good ending and got home.

Escape The Night by Joey Graceffa & Eleven Little Roosters by RoosterTeeth

Though these are just web series, they can help inspire with, for Escape The Night, puzzle mechanics and physical puzzles that we can think up of to make the space much more interactive. It pulls inspiration from Escape Rooms where their behind the scenes also shows how the series worked. 

1. Mexico 2. India 3. Nigeria 4. Pakistan 5. Venezuela 6. Lebanon 7. Philippines 8. Afghanistan 9. Colombia 10. Iraq 11. Syria 12. Guatemala 13. Yemen 14. Libya 15. Egypt 16. Brazil 16. Kenya (tied) 18. Nepal 19. Malaysia 19. South Africa (tied)

(link) Business Insider reported this list according to RiskMap 2014, and we could narrow down the countries we could set the story in.

Looking at RiskMap, Phlippines have 150 kidnappings reported in 2013.

The Big Bad Wolf

We sat down and started discussing how our Big Bad Wolf would be, the main culprit of who kidnapped our main character. Looking into the kidnapping scene, many captives are tourists visiting and they either try and get ransom money from the embassy or sell them off for human trafficking and the sex trade.

We researched through stories of such whether it’s in Asia or anywhere else around the world we tried to understand through their recounts and stories:

Modern Day Slavery in South East Asia

Women held captive in UK

‘Eden” - movie about sex slavery

Another recent example of a person playing games with people through a series of tests and rounds is the final episode of Sherlock season 4 “The Final Problem, where Eurus keeps Sherlock and gang locked up until they solve all the riddles and people’s lives are constantly at stake.

I was watching this series and the way the tests happen for the characters brings an intriguing though of how we can bring tests into the project as well, the most noticeable test that caught our attention is one in Episode 2: Coins, where the candidate are placed in a room to analyse a scene made of mannequins and answer what happened.