Crumbling Prince (Ukiyo)

Review by Michael

This room is already famous, but my question isn’t so much “Is this room worth doing” so much as “What just happened to us?” or, less startlingly, “What did the medium, as a whole, seem to learn from The Crumbling Prince?” I’m not sure it matters whether it has flaws or not, since so many of its features are meant to be deceptively flat. There’s a school-play simplicity of the initial stage of the experience, and an affected harmlessness in the tone of the recorded messages that issue from the scarecrow-like figure at the up-stage center. Both are just setting us up for a twist. It’s not one you could predict from my saying that, so I don’t feel too bad about bringing that up, because the fact that there isn’t a cliche “suddenly everything’s evil!” surprise at the heart of this story is one of the most admirable things about it. Imagine, being able to create a sense of deep, almost disorienting surprise without having to make any change in the soundtrack, the decor, anything at all except your understanding of what story you’re actually in.

That’s the part that sounds elliptical in a review like this, were it’s important not to give plot details. My point is just that a “plot twist” is a different element in an escape room than it is in any other medium. Escape rooms can bear the narrative weight of a situation, but not a story. So the best lesson to learn from Crumbling Prince (the first chapter anyway) probably has to do with feeling the cognitive shift, into high-gear, once the facts of that situation come into focus. The puzzle-challenges suddenly make sense on more than one level, reducing mental friction and creating an “all downhill from here” feeling. It’s like a hint system, without anyone knowing they’ve been given a hint, because it’s achieved through subtext and context, rather than… well, rather than just text.

All that aside, the room looks great, and it’s unique in more ways than those I tried to outline above. If there’s ever a canon of “Top Ten Most Significant Rooms Ever”, it will probably be on it. Will it be one of the Ten Best? Maybe, maybe not, but where it stands out amid the strongest examples of the art form is in its significance, I think; especially its contribution to our understanding of how stories are best told in cryptic environments, where the best puzzles are those which are seem to cooperate with the solver once the solver is testing the right hunch — and which reward the solver, upon completion, with confirmation of that hunch, so that it becomes insight. That’s what Crumbling Prince demonstrates for us again and again.
—