Step Into Our Escape Room…
Watch a short film about one of our most ambitious projects to date The Night The Day Was Broken.
This summer, we took on the challenge of producing the world’s first ever escape room designed entirely by young people.
The mysterious OP has gone missing and everything suddenly went dark in the middle of the day. It seems OP’s adventures with time travel have broken time, and our players are the only ones who can save the day. Following clues and solving challenges, can our players activate the time machine and make day dawn again.
Each part of the project, The Night the Day Was Broken, was written and produced by our young writers aged 11-15 from our Community Writing Labs. They created the character, the world, diary entries, set the design brief and designed the interactive games and puzzles.
Professional escape room company Modern Fables then took-up the challenge of realising the young people’s vision, culminating in a two-stage escape room hidden behind the secret door at our fantastical shop, Hoxton Street Monster Supplies.
Over 50 of our younger writers, aged 8-11, then created content for the room – from mysterious riddles to persona poems – filling the escape room with weird and wonderful objects and their stories. Ministry of Stories Writing Labs are free to all children in the Hackney area and aim to inspire and build confidence, creativity and wellbeing in the young people who attend.
Jessica Randall, Writing Programme Manager explains: “The idea for creating the escape room came from the young people’s interests in gaming, world building and interactive or immersive experiences. I really wanted the young people to get a sense that they could create a world that people could enjoy and inhabit. That writing is in everything around them from the games they play to the music they listen to. This is the first time a group of young people have conceived all elements for an escape room and we’re really proud of the scale and richness they have produced.”
This project was supported by Hackney Council’s Shoreditch and Hoxton Art Fund, which is made possible by development contributions from Shoreditch.
