Tips for Solving Escape Room Puzzles

Whether it’s your very first time or your sixth visit, the moment the timer starts to tick down on an escape room is an exhilarating feeling. You’ve got 45 minutes to solve a series of puzzles set up to tantalize your brain—and maybe the future of the human race or the safety of yours and your friends’ brains is on the line.

It’s easy to get off to an energized start, with everyone pumped and ready to outsmart the escape room designer! But sometimes your team can hit a lull. That next clue or puzzle just isn’t materializing—and you start to feel at a loss.

You can always ask for a hint (more often than not, one is needed!), but what if you’ve run out?

If you find yourself in that situation next time you’re playing one of Krakit’s four Vancouver escape rooms, just take into consideration some of the tips below.

1. Scour your environment for hints

This is the most basic step when it comes to an escape game. Not just a Sudoku puzzle on a sheet of paper or a Rubik’s Cube you can hold in your hand, the entire room is a piece of the puzzle.

Remember that even if an element isn’t an actual clue, it still might be subtlety pointing you in the right direction. It’s easy to focus intently on the details and miss the big picture. So slop, slow down, and take another scan of the room, looking for larger patterns and anomalies in those patterns.

2. Gather all of the clues in one spot

Whether you do this physically or on a piece of paper, keeping all of the clues you find in one spot is helpful. Even if you don’t know how an element fits just quite yet, by having everything side by side, you’ll be able to piece it together when the time comes.

Plus, when you’re playing on a larger team, you want to make sure everyone has a chance to investigate each clue, so that no one is missing out on a vital element.

3. Take a second look

Maybe you found one of the later clues very early on in your game, and you didn’t even realize it. In the hustle and bustle, it can be easy to forget about such clues. And after just a few more minutes of gameplay, you may view that original clue entirely differently. Don’t forget to periodically turn your attention back to unsolved clues, reshuffle and review them, and see if they are now fitting differently into the puzzle narrative.