Ten Years In: How We Think About Immersion

In less than a decade, escape rooms went from padlocks on IKEA furniture to a global industry with over 100,000 rooms. Phil Edwards traces that arc in his video above, and it captures something we've been living from the inside.

We opened our first room inside the Beurs van Berlage, a building that was already a century old when we moved in. From the start, the bet was on craft. Real marble fireplaces. Hand-built props. Stories that gave the puzzles a reason to exist. Phil singled out The Alchemist as a masterclass in atmospheric design. We're proud of that. It cost us time, money, and a fair amount of stubbornness to get there.

What ten years taught us about immersion

Immersion isn't a single ingredient. It's not the set design, or the puzzle logic, or the story. It's what happens when those three stop feeling like separate things. A room works when players forget they're in a room.

Francine and Victor have spent a decade chasing that. They came from theatre and set design, not game development, and it shows in how Sherlocked rooms are built. The goal was never the cleverest puzzle. It was to make you feel something you didn't expect.

We've written a longer piece on the craft behind it: what actually makes an escape room immersive.

The honest version of running rooms for ten years

Behind every good room is maintenance. Props break. Guests find creative ways to interact with things they shouldn't. A room that cost a few thousand euros to build in 2015 now takes six figures to do at the standard we want. Inflation, the pandemic, rising costs, none of that passed us by.

Edwards described it well: people in this industry are grinding through the business to create art. That's accurate. What keeps it going is the other side of it. Watching a group finally crack a puzzle they've been stuck on for twenty minutes. Someone stepping out and saying they completely forgot where they were. That doesn't wear off.

Where it goes from here

The industry is still finding its edges. Immersive entertainment is moving in every direction, actor-led experiences, interactive theatre, formats that don't have a name yet. We're part of that conversation, and we don't have it all mapped out.

Ten years in, we're not reflecting. We're building the next room. And the one after that.

If you haven't played one of our rooms yet, start with The Alchemist. See everything we make here.