Introduction
Ruze Escape Rooms will be a mystery room, offering a live action puzzle-based experience created to satisfy a wide variety of demographic groups in Canada. We will be devoted to consistently providing high value through our unique room design consistent with the customer’s need for adrenaline, engagement, and teamwork.
Brand Highlights
We intend to make our business a number one priority to our customers and to stand somewhere among the leading escape room businesses in Canada.
Following are the main highlights of our brand that we have planned to incorporate:
Engage an audience in real life
Bridge the gap between physical and digital
New team building environments
Unique and exciting customer experience
The Market Opportunity
A relatively new industry, but with a promising growth potential, the Escape/Mystery room industry was born in 2007 in Japan and has grown from zero to over 2800 fixed Mystery rooms across the world in under five years. As many as 163 new Mystery rooms have emerged in the past year in the Canada alone with 69 of them being in Ontario, Canada.
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A single group will be served for approximately 1 hour and we will be able to accommodate 8 sessions per day across the one room.
Our games will excite customers, help them to discover their team energy and build their team working skills all in a fun and an engaging way. Our face in front of the customers will be our friendly game masters who will be specifically trained to be an extension of the unique customer experience.
We will change the clues and puzzles regularly to diversify the offered games and to gain loyal clients. We will organize a special leaderboard for the best result times of the teams, this will increase the challenge and will stimulate and encourage teams to visit us again in order to compete with each other.
In order to gain an additional competitive advantage, we will set a very comfortable and thematic waiting area that will provide above average amenities to the customers. Customers will feel excited before the games even begin.
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About the Owners
Our founders are well-versed in live action experiences and have a proven track record of excellent customer relationship skills. They are passionate about the emergence of the mystery room industry and are confident that they are entering the market at an opportunistic time before the industry becomes saturated.
The Enterprise
Mission Statement
Our mission is to provide an exhilarating and one-of-a-kind experience that will challenge your wits and provide enjoyment at the same time.
Concept Statement
The themed entertainment industry is expanding quickly as people increasingly search for fun and exciting ways to break away from the routine everyday activities that fill their time. In particular, games with thrilling and unique experiences have attracted the attention of many. While activities such as skydiving, mountain climbing, and swimming with sharks are definitely exciting, the mystery room presents the excitement without the risk and danger, thereby appealing to a far larger and more diverse group of customers.
We are passionate about starting this new business and providing high customer value through our uniquely designed and diversified mystery rooms. The rooms will be aligned to customers’ needs for adrenaline, engagement, and teamwork. We will accomplish long lasting customer relationships by offering inter-team competitions and regularly changing the games and clues presented within each room. Furthermore, customers will be able to work their way up the difficulty levels by attempting each of the three different themes.
How does a Mystery Room work?
What is a Mystery Room?
Although the genre itself was inspired by “Mystery the Room” games that appeared on PC in the early 2000’s, Mystery Rooms are not video games, but real-life experiences where a small group of players are “locked” inside an actual room and must solve a series of puzzles in order to escape within the allotted period of time.
What make Escape/Mystery Rooms Appealing?
Recently, advancements in technology, such as virtual reality headsets and motion-sensor gaming consoles, have been trying to simulate the physical world in the digital space. Even with these advancements, there are limits to the immersion. With the mystery room, we are doing the opposite. We are bringing the digital to a physical gaming experience to elevate the senses: touch, see, taste, smell, and hear, in order to pull our players into the story.
What Makes Our Mystery Room Stand Out?
The mystery room will stand out from others in this field for one major reason: We will have a group of highly motivated designers that will be concentrating on a creating a fully immersive end-to-end complete experience. We will be creating this room from a designer standpoint by applying game design and user experience principles.
Mystery Room Experience
Players will feel like they are part of the story even before they arrive at the onsite location. The entire experience has been designed to turn players into characters from the first time they see one of our advertisements all the way until they solve the room. Players can go online after visiting the Mystery Room to view group pictures, read background stories to other rooms, or book different rooms to try.
Puzzles
Once inside the actual room, players will have to work together to solve puzzles, find clues, and unravel the untold mysteries of the room. Each room will be telling an immersive story using video, audio, and physical computing technologies that tie all of the puzzles together.
Mystery Room Mission
The Mystery Room will turn players into characters by activating most of the five senses in a real life mystery adventure. The story is told at the intersection of the physical and the digital world.
The mystery room is unlike common types of group entertainment, such as going to the movies, grabbing drinks at the bar, or hitting up the karaoke lounge. The goal of the mystery room is to provide a more unique and memorable experience that brings friends and coworkers closer together. It gives them the opportunity to enter a world unlike their own and become the main characters of the story being told in each room.
There are three primary missions that The Mystery Room experience will be designed to accomplish:
Engage the Audience in Real Life Experiences
The mystery room audiences are adventurers with a passion for uncovering mysteries and solving puzzles, with many of them being sci-fi and mystery genre fans. The mystery room will bring its audiences into the adventures that they read in books or see in movies by immersing them in various storylines and themes.
While in a mystery room, players will be the stars of the show. They will have the power to solve the mystery and find a way to escape the room. Instead of just reading about detectives in mystery books or watching superheroes on the big screen, the players themselves will be the detectives and heroes as they work together to escape before time runs out.
Bridge the Gap Between Physical & Digital
The mystery room will be a physical form of entertainment with a digital twist. Technologies will be used to elevate human senses (touch, see, taste, smell, hear), such as sensors that track player movement or a user-triggered sound. With more digital interactions, players will have the opportunity to engage in a more dynamic puzzle-solving environment.
Provide a new Team Building Environment
The secondary audience of the mystery room are corporate teams looking for new team-building opportunities. Common team building activities include rope courses, sporting events, or weekend retreats. These are all great opportunities for team building and are done fairly often.
The mystery room is a new and unique team-building experience where communication, collaboration, and brainstorming are required. The mystery room is more inclusive because it does not require as much physical activity compared to other team-building exercises. Since there will be a variety of puzzles in each room, there will be an activity for every type of team member: the leaders, the researchers, the planners, the creative ones, the communicators, etc. In addition to this, many tech companies in the area will be drawn to the more digital team-building environment that the mystery room provides.
What makes a good game for a Mystery Room?
There are a lot of factors that go into making an exciting mystery room adventure. In the end, we can decide which of these are the most important but here are some things to consider:
Theme
Is the theme engaging? Is there a captivating backstory? If a group is not into dinosaurs, they might not necessarily like or appreciate a dinosaur-themed room. We will try to pick a theme that sounds interesting or intriguing to us.
Staging/Décor
How well is the room staged? Does it look like the environment we are supposed to be in? Do the objects in the room belong in here? If the theme is a wild west mining town, does it make sense to have a briefcase that needs to be opened? Attention to detail in room staging and decor can go a long way to increasing the immersive experience.
Puzzles
This is where the rubber meets the road in mystery rooms. As mentioned above, a good game should be challenging. However, the puzzles must make sense and be solvable. A good puzzle gives us that “Aha!” moment where it all becomes clear. A poor puzzle has us still scratching our head even once it is solved. Even if the puzzle is deviously deceptive and difficult, it should still be crystal clear once we know the solution.
Game Design
Just having a bunch of puzzles in a room does not make for a top-notch game experience. Puzzles should be chained together to keep the story moving forward. It is common and more enjoyable to have one or more “meta-puzzles” in a game. These are larger puzzles that often require solving smaller puzzles to get clues for the larger meta-puzzle.
Safety & Comfort
At all times, players must be in a safe environment. There should be no physical obstacles that can be seen as a hazard to players. Rooms should never require players to exert excessive physical force, be into uncomfortably tight spaces, jump or climb to reach clues, or be put into any sort of physical distress. There is a difference between the thrill of fantasy danger and genuine threat of physical injury or discomfort. Rooms that involve strobing lights, fog machines, strong odors, loud noises, etc., should be clearly indicated in advance so that players can act and plan accordingly.