Open Door Policy: Can an Escape Room Be Queer?

Hello! Eurogamer is once again celebrating Pride with a week of features celebrating the intersection between LGBTQIA+ culture and gaming in all its forms. Today, Florence Smith Nicholls explores experimental escape room Memoirscape and its queer love story in the 80s.

“This piece is very gendered.”

We’re in a teenage girl’s bedroom—the exact location and date are a bit fuzzy, but it’s somewhere in Queens, New York, in 1986. All the trappings of adolescence are there, posters on the walls, a brightly colored duvet, knick-knacks. The space is bathed in warm light. I sit on the bed and pick up a romance novel that’s been left nearby. It’s comfortable, you might even say cozy, 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 more closely at the photos on the walls, some of the faces seem crossed out. Oh, and the novel is extremely gay.

It’s Memoirscape, a self-described “cozy escape room” created as part of the Interactive Experience Design course at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Its slightly sci-fi setting places players in the role of participants in a live demonstration of Dr. Julia Adler’s work on interactive memories. For this particular experience, they enter one of Adler’s memories, exploring a blissful summer she spent in her grandmother’s New York apartment before heading off to college. Here, in an experience that combines elements of immersive theater and environmental storytelling, they’re free to interact with Adler’s childhood living room and bedroom at their leisure, learning about her past—and her long-lost love—through the ephemera in each room. As the Memoirscape website puts it, “Let your curiosity guide you and watch the story unfold.”

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Like other escape rooms, Memoirscape features puzzles to solve. Players must find a series of cassette tapes and write down the corresponding letters to form a code, for example, while other clues, such as a cryptic message on the television, prompt them to find other solutions. Unlike traditional escape rooms, however, there is no time limit and the “escape” is less literal; the ultimate goal is to figure out how to help Dr. Adler by leaving the cozy living room, finding her office, and discovering why she is so obsessed with reliving the summer of 1986. “This is an experience, like childhood, that you must eventually leave behind,” the official description continues. “How you choose to do it, what you do when you leave, and how you feel about your memories of that experience… is up to you.” There are even four different endings, none of which diminish the player if they don’t go any further.

Given that Memoirscape is presented as a space that you can enter, soak in, and exit whenever you please, its sense of atmosphere is key—and its recreation of a nostalgic, cozy corner of 1986 is certainly impressive. Memoirscape’s design is built on what its narrative and production consultant Katherine Crighton calls “asynchronous storytelling through ephemera”—inspired by Punchdrunk’s immersive experience Sleep No More and Henning Nelm’s 1969 manual Magic and Showmanship—and, as someone who studies archaeological approaches to games, I was fascinated by this material culture.

The rooms that make up Dr. Adler’s memento of his grandmother’s apartment are filled with authentic ’80s knickknacks, including carefully curated bookshelves and vintage board games. There are even ’80s-style video games programmed specifically for the experience by Samin Shahriar Tokey using a Raspberry Pi and a touchscreen. But amid all of these authentic details, there’s perhaps one element that really gets to the heart of Memoirscape: the novel I mentioned at the beginning, author Nancy Garden’s 1982 queer young adult love story Annie on My Mind.

As Crighton tells me via email, Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Interactive Media and Game Development program—for which Memoirscape was created—has a vibrant community of queer students, “and so the development of Julia Adler…as a young lesbian in 1986 was a watershed moment of ‘write what you know.’” And between Memoirscape’s more familiar escape room elements is a queer love story that Annie on My Mind mirrors almost by accident. “As I began digging through the book to make sure it still fit into our comfortable gameplay,” Crighton says, “I discovered one connection after another not only to the characters our students had created, but also to our larger world.” After that, choosing to make the love story between Julie and Steph, and the persistence of memory fueled by that love, the idea was to receive the key to a door that we hadn’t realized could be opened.”

Indeed, Memoirscape’s very particular ’80s nostalgia extends beyond mere aesthetics. On the path to uncovering Alder’s past, for example, players use real, old-fashioned audio cassettes to gather clues—a process that Crighton says encourages them to “be patient and mindful” as they interact with unfamiliar analog technology. But the 1986 setting also creates a certain kind of tension for a queer person who might be nostalgic for the era, albeit a less forgiving one. I was disappointed but not surprised to discover that Annie on My Mind has been the subject of controversy over the years, even being burned in Kansas City in 1993 simply because it’s about two young women in love.

Ultimately, Memoirscape invites a different kind of escape beyond time measurements, accommodating a range of play styles to suit different tastes. For me, browsing its carefully curated, period-appropriate books and ephemera was a joy, but other players might choose to simply hang out with their friends, play chess, and soak up its period atmosphere. Or they might choose to whizz through the puzzles and uncover Adler’s secrets as quickly as possible. Without spoiling too much, the way to progress through the story and find Dr. Adler’s office is always hidden in plain sight, and there’s nothing stopping players from leaving and finding her lab, or even Adler herself. In this way, Memoirscape perhaps subverts one of the core tenets of escape rooms; it’s not that players are prevented from leaving, they’re given a space so comfortable that they don’t. to want leave.

Given Memoirscape’s emphasis on setting design and exploration, it reminded me of video games with similar themes. An obvious parallel would be developer Fullbright’s walking simulator Gone Home; like that game’s slowly unfolding tale of family revelations, Adler’s story is told as an epistolary narrative, allowing players to discover more at their own pace. I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if other games with rich environmental narratives like Elden Ring created a challenge through distraction rather than conflict. Imagine if all of the books in Elden Ring’s Raya Lucaria Academy were readable—it would certainly add a new kind of difficulty for history buffs!

With the new wave of dark and cozy games like Grave Seasons and Wanderstop, there seems to be an appetite for experiences that challenge the comforts they provide. Memoirscape proves that an escape room can be queer not only in terms of subject matter, but also by challenging players by creating a literal comfort zone that they must break out of. It’s a cozy escape room that isn’t afraid to tackle the complexities of queerness and nostalgia, particularly in terms of how we can romanticize the past, both on a personal and broader level. As Kathleen says, “After all, you need the darkness to curl up closer to home.”