Cousins Sam Wai and Hon Ban Lee have left behind their day jobs and have set out on the road to becoming the next startup success story, hoping to use Kickstarter to raise the final £5,000 needed to make the dream of creating their own escape room a reality.

Wai and Lee have received the financial backing from 58 supporters as of this writing, generating £2,495. The clock is counting down fast though, with the 10 a.m. ET deadline that will hit on April 7, and the project is still 55 percent short of its £5,000 funding goal. Current trending models estimate that Wai and Lee’s Enigma Escape to make £3,516, a 30 percent shortfall, without a significant boost in funding.

Enigma Escape is the pair’s brainchild of bringing a new escape room to central London and the designers know that they’re entering an area where the competition is already fierce. What Wai and Lee believe will put them ahead of growing number of escape rooms coming to the city will be its focus on narrative.

“We believe that the theme and story is a key fundamental of escape game design. It not only gives the game a purpose, it will also add variety in your portfolio of games,” described Hon to Puzzle Pile. “[Appealing] themes and stories will also help you differentiate yourselves from the crowd. An escape game without a theme or story is essentially a Puzzle Hunt.”

“[If] there’s a story to the game then the puzzles better be story-driven…  Just like a video game, we present to our customers cinematic videos before and after the escape game, and depending on their performance, they will see different endings to round off the story!”

There are several story driven escape rooms planned, but The Killer will be the first to debut if the project successfully funds. Players journey through a narrative that brings them to a midnight showing of The Killer at a local cinema. After arriving, the movie begins and displays nothing but static on the screen, leading to twists and turns as puzzlers try to escape the caged movie house.

While there are many business related issues that will dictate when new modules will be brought to Enigma Escape, Wai says that the team would like to bring a new story to puzzlers “every 4-6 months.”

As with all good escape rooms, Wai and Hon have planned a wide diversity of challenges to test the resolve of puzzlers.

“These puzzles will test the player in a variety of areas,” described Hon. “[Including] dexterity and patience with physical puzzles, teamwork and delegation with complex puzzles, and in particular initiative and problem solving skills for everything else.

“An example of a complex puzzle… would be an access keypad to a doorway. For veteran escape game players, they may try to connect random strings of numbers found in the room and try it on the keypad, but this is a classic example of over thinking the problem.

“If players analyse the keypad carefully, they may find that 4 digits have been worn down over a long period of wear and tear. Perhaps this makes sense as per the story: the employees that walk day in day out would naturally not have pressed any other digits. With 4 digits worked out, the access code will be 1 out of 24 possible combinations.”

The designers have certainly put their money where their mouth is, the two having supplied £55,000 of their own funds to help open Enigma Escape. Wai and Lee have even gone so far as to leave their promising careers to pursue the vision.

“Hon and I were in full time managerial positions sitting comfortably on a rewarding career when we decided to resign for Enigma Escape,” Wai told Puzzle Pile. “We were both working long hours and found it difficult to find the time to work on the project with full focus. Furthermore, we had to make calls, meetings, viewings, purchases, all of which were difficult when we’re stuck in the office with our day jobs.

“Therefore, it was the right choice to resign as soon as possible. We don’t regret our decisions as we wouldn’t be where we are now if it happened any other way!”

The team is looking for support and there are plenty of Kickstarter rewards, so check out the project’s page and see if Enigma Escape is something that deserves a kickstart.

Source: Enigma Escape, Kickstarter, Kicktraq