One of the coolest ideas in Resident Evil 7 is an “escape the room” section from the first expansion. Your protagonist has to solve a long string of puzzles to get out of a bedroom, while trying not to tip off the woman who locked you there in the first place. So a real-life escape room based on the Resident Evil franchise, which launched last year in Los Angeles, is a perfect fit. While it was originally launched as a promotional for Resident Evil 7, the experience recently reopened it to the public, this time in New York. When Capcom offered me a chance to try it out, I grabbed my colleague Ross Miller and went to a late-night puzzle session.
The Resident Evil Escape Experience, as it’s called, follows general escape room conventions. A group of six people (in this case me, Ross, and four strangers) enter a room full of locks, keys, hidden codes, and physical puzzles. From the moment you step inside, you get 45 minutes to solve all these puzzles and get out. What’s unique, of course, is that it takes place in a beloved fictional universe with its own mythos and history — and that a lot of that mythos is very, very creepy. Weirdly, though, this turns out to be the experience’s biggest weakness.
A cool mythos, an anticlimactic setup
The Resident Evil escape room isn’t based on Resident Evil 7, but it’s not really telling a new story, either. Instead, it uses an oddly anticlimactic framing device: you and your teammates are entering an Umbrella Corporation training sim that looks like different rooms from various games, designed to test your teamwork skills.
This helps justify the arbitrary puzzles, as well as the Umbrella Corporation assistant who whispers hints if your group gets stuck. But it also sucks out a lot of the tension. Compared to the life-or-death situations in the games, there are low fictional stakes for failing, and no sense that you’re uncovering a larger narrative in an organic environment. The Resident Evil lore elements feel designed to be comfortably familiar, not evocative. Hey, remember Jill Valentine? Here’s her badge! Obviously, all room escape and adventure game scenarios are inherently unreal, but I’d be more than willing to suspend disbelief for a more exciting setup.