WHAT IS A RED HERRING IN AN ESCAPE ROOM?
A red herring - in an escape room - is something put in the room specifically intended to mislead or distract players, and has nothing to do with the actual game play.
There are a few reasons we do not use red herrings in ESCAPE! Alaska escape rooms.
A properly designed room will fill your time finding actual clues and solving actual puzzles, so you do not need to be distracted. This is also way more fun.
Many players will create their own red herrings in a room, focusing on parts of the set that have nothing to do with the game.
Red herrings just aren’t fun, and we’re all about the fun!
We arrived at conclusion #3 while still researching escape rooms and playing them ourselves. At an escape room franchise in Memphis, we were playing a casino game, and at one point we triggered a hidden door (which was very well hidden, by the way!). Just as the door cracked open slightly, a slot machine poured coins out onto the floor. We didn’t see or hear the door, but instead spent quite some time investigating the coins and the slot machine before the game director announced on the speaker that it had nothing to do with the game, and was only there to distract us from the door opening. In spite of the fact there were some other cool parts to that game, their inclusion of something designed to waste our time was what we remembered most. Once we had achieved the next step, why didn’t they want us to move on to that next puzzle?
You can avoid #2, creating red herrings in your mind, by simply following the guidance of the room. There should always be a reason the room gives you for doing something, and if you can’t explain why you’re doing what you’re doing, you may be distracting yourself.
At ESCAPE! Alaska, all our games are designed to be played through, moving from one puzzle to another, from one cinematic moment to the next, and will never intentionally include anything designed to get you off course in your quest to complete the room.