Padlocks are essentially more characteristic of old-school, first-generation escape rooms, since modern solutions such as magnetic locks, sensors and the like can offer deeper immersion in rooms with certain themes. There are escape rooms with no padlocks at all, where everything is electronic. In designing our rooms we found it best to combine the two approaches, so that lovers of both worlds can find what they are looking for.
Plain key padlocks can of course become boring after a while, and they don’t give us much room to manoeuvre in terms of room design either. So we always try to vary things a little, use new types of padlock and build in locks that open by new mechanisms. One example is the directional padlock shown in the picture, which you’ll find among others in our Magic World rooms, as well as the dial padlock, which works on a similar principle to a safe lock.
These bring fresh colour to the padlock range not only because of the interesting opening mechanism (the dial lock), but because the nature of the codes they need (directions) and the hunt for and decoding of each character make for a novel experience too… and hiding a directional combination opens up new, more creative possibilities for us as well, compared with hiding a simple key or number combination.
A (perhaps) interesting set of statistics about our padlocks and locks:
For the reopening we naturally checked the rooms through — they had stood empty for almost two months — to see whether they were ready to play. We went over and tested the locks, padlocks, maps, wands, machines, lamps and other props… and that little inventory gave us the idea for the following statistics.
You could also put it this way: anyone who wants to conquer all our rooms has this much to face. Number of rooms: 7. Total padlocks: 38 — 17 key padlocks, 17 letter- and number-code padlocks, 4 directional padlocks. Other key, code and trick locks, doors and so on: 41 — 12 key-operated (doors, cabinets), 6 code-operated (briefcase, switchboard, colour codes), 23 other (things opened by magnetic/infrared/laser/UV wands, magnetic locks, wall levers).
Total number of characters in the codes and passwords to be decoded and collected: 139 — 81 numbers, 20 letters, 36 directions, 3 other.
Good luck with it :)
