“This room is very gender.”
We’re in a teen bedroom – the exact location and date is a little hazy, but it’s somewhere in Queens, New York City, in 1986. All the hallmarks of adolescence are here, posters on the walls, a brightly covered duvet, knick-knacks. The space is bathed in warm light. I sit down on the bed and pick up a romance novel left nearby. It’s comfortable, one might even say cosy, but we’re not alone. Another group is huddled around a cassette player, listening to a recording of a private conversation between two young women. When I look closer at the photographs on the walls, some of the faces seem to be crossed out. Oh, and the novel is .
This is Memoirscape, a self-styled ‘cosy escape room’ created as part of the Design of Interactive Experiences course at Massachusetts’ Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Its slightly sci-fi set-up casts players as participants in a live demonstration of Dr. Julia Adler’s work on interactive memories. For this particular experiment, they step into one of Adler’s own memories, exploring a happy summer she spent in her grandmother’s NYC apartment before heading off to college. Here, in an experience combining elements of immersive theatre and environmental storytelling, they’re free to interact with Adler’s childhood living room and bedroom as they please, learning more about her past – and her long-lost love – through the ephemera in each room. As Memoirscape’s website puts it,”Let your curiosity guide you, and notice the narrative unfold.”
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Like other escape rooms, Memoirscape features puzzles to solve. Players are tasked with finding a series of cassette tapes and noting down corresponding letters to form a code, for instance, while other clues, such as a cryptic message on the TV, prompt them toward further solutions. Unlike traditional escape rooms, however, there’s no time limit and the “escape” is less literal; the ultimate goal is to work out how to help Dr. Adler by leaving the cosy living room behind, finding her office, and figuring out why she’s so fixated on reliving the summer of 1986. “It’s an experience, like childhood, you’ll eventually have to leave behind,” continues the official description. “How you choose to do so, what you do when you leave, and how you feel about your memory of it… that’s what’s up to you.” There are even four different endings, none of which diminish the player for not getting further.