Five Things The Purge: Breakout Taught Me About Writing

My family really, really loves scary shit. Even my youngest daughter, a self-proclaimed wimp, finds herself drawn to books and movies she knows are going to scare the living crap out of her. When we had a chance to take part in what looked like a pretty freaky interactive experience, we couldn’t pass it up. Which is how we wound up kidnapped by a maniac known as Big Daddy and locked inside a tarp-covered cage.

I’m going to try and limit the spoilers here, as this is a tremendous amount of fun that I don’t want to ruin for anyone, but a little background is in order. The Purge: Breakout is one of a burgeoning number of “escape the room” games. The goal here is straightforward: unravel the puzzles to escape captivity. This particular version has a time limit – you have thirty minutes to get out before Big Daddy comes home and eats your face. If you have a chance to check this out, I strongly recommend you grab your tickets. At $25 a head, it’s not cheap, but the experience is worth every penny.

And let me just make it clear that we didn’t survive. We were close, but we missed an early clue and one of my daughters had trouble operating a rotary phone, which caused us to juuuuust miss our escape. Still, it was the most fun we’ve had in a long time. It also taught me a few things about writing that I hadn’t really considered before.

You Are Not So Cool

First, I’m lucky enough to have been in very few life-or-death situations, where my ability to make a snap decision in a logical, efficient manner determined my odds of survival. The breakout experience starts tense and just keeps ratcheting up the stress with every minute that passes. There’s a constant reminder of how much time you have remaining before Big Daddy comes back. You have a captured girl moaning and mumbling in your ear the whole time. It’s dark and noisy and the environment is strange and unsettling. All of these things make even simple tasks, like loading a DVD into a player, nerve-wracking and time consuming. When put into a really dangerous situation, most people are going to make some dumbass decision. Maybe your characters should, too.

Your Readers Need Your Help

These puzzle games are intricate. The designers often scatter multiple clues to the same puzzle around, which makes it possible to solve a challenge in more than one way. But if you take half of one solution and half of another solution, what you end up with is a bunch of unhelpful shit. While I’m not mystery writer, there are some mysteries stuck up inside my horror stories. And what I learned here is that in order for a mystery to be satisfying, like a puzzle, when the solution is presented you have to feel like it’s something you could have figured out on your own. It has to make sense, and often that will mean making the mysterious clues more obvious to the reader.

Hell is Other People

Having six people working on the same puzzle seems nice in theory. In reality, it’s a giant pain in the ass. In a stressful situation, everyone wants to get moving, everyone wants to figure out what needs to be done next. But people aren’t thinking about communicating. They have an idea of what needs to happen, but the stress and confusion and fact that some of these people are ohmygodwhyareyousoannoyingrightnowgivethattome, makes it very hard to tell people what you think needs to happen. In a crisis, someone needs to step up and be the leader, or everyone flops around like morons until the cannibals show up with machetes and chop off all the heads. If you’re writing a story about a group of people trapped in dire situations, keep that in mind: no leader, no success.

You Run Faster When You’re On Fire

I do not like putting my hands into gross things. I just don’t. Call me crazy, but the idea of shoving my fist into a garbage disposal that might be clogged up with chunks of rotting people is high on my list of things I would like to fucking avoid. Yet, in the artificially intense scenario of trying to escape from Big Daddy, I was up to my elbow in grue without hesitation. Your characters should respond in much the same way. Which are you more afraid of? The dark or the guy screaming after you with the chainsaw? This is an opportunity for growth and character development, because when push comes to shove you can get through a lot of your bullshit issues when your ass is on the line.

Unexpected is Unexpected

In the very beginning of this puzzle scenario, we were stuck in a cage. We could see the pieces of the puzzle that we needed to solve, but we could also see that solving the puzzle could turn into a massive time sink due to the low lighting and cramped quarters. We were all feeling a little overwhelmed and bummed out, because it seemed like we were going to face an uphill climb. Then my middle daughter turned sideways and slipped right through the bars of the cage. Our smallest team member had suddenly become our ace in the hole – she had us out of the cage and onto the next challenge in less than a minute. As long as you set it up beforehand, this kind of unexpected turn of a disadvantage to an advantage, can be a great moment in your story. I’ll never forget how the cast member’s eyes bugged out when we bypassed the whole puzzle. The only time I saw her break character was in that moment, when she just couldn’t help but grin at the unexpected twist.

Bonus Lesson: Cut the Crap

There were two puzzles that stopped us from escaping. The first was a puzzle that wasn’t a puzzle at all, just a dead-end that wasted a few minutes of our time. The second was a puzzle with two sets of clues for the same solution. Both of these are the kind of red herring that I hate as a reader and really hate as a gamer. They didn’t add anything to the challenge narrative, they were just speed bumps to cause failure. Worse, they annoyed everyone.

Look for this kind of bullshit in your writing. You don’t want to send your readers bouncing down a bunny trail that dead-ends. It’s a waste of time for both of you, and you don’t have time to waste. And if you waste your readers’ time, even once, there’s a good chance they won’t spend anymore of it with your stories. What really stuck out to me, as a basically inert lump of writer meat who doesn’t normally find himself in panic-inducing situations, was how this kind of stress and tension made my whole team simultaneously more and less competent. While we were much worse at seemingly simple tasks, we became very, very good at digging up clues and pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zones. I heartily recommend The Purge: Breakout to anyone with some extra time and money.

At the very least, it’ll let you know who among your circle of friends you’ll have to leave behind if the shit ever hits the fan.