Meet David Staffell: Puzzle Game Design, Escape Rooms, and Beyond! | Interview

We’re thrilled to introduce the newest writer, David Staffell! 🎉

As a seasoned escape room designer best known for his work at Bewilder Box, David brings a wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm for the escape room community and we’re thrilled to share this interview. Not only will he be sharing insights on game design on The Escape Roomer in the future, but he’ll also be diving into detailed escape room reviews like one you may have noticed already published last week, The Acid Bath Murderer.

Without further ado, we welcome David! In this interview, we chat about some of his favourite rooms, his creative process, and like any superhero designer, a cool origin story. Let’s jump in!

Hey David! So I know who you are, but could you please introduce yourself to The Escape Roomer?

Good question! Who am I? Hi, I’m David Staffell! I’m a big gaming enthusiast, and in particular I love puzzle games.

I really struggle with my ability to pay attention to things, but when I’m problem-solving, I experience this feeling of pure zen, so I think that’s why I got so into them too. They really calm my brain and I get a lot of pleasure from solving through a really good puzzle. In reality, I probably spend a little too much of my time gaming, but I’m really lucky that my work is in the same area as one of my biggest life passions, so I never consider it time wasted.

Before games, I studied English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sussex, although I kind of hated it and what I really wanted to do was become a graphic designer. My dad was an artist and owned his own model making company at the time, so he taught me a lot of vector drawing back in the early days not long after computers had become a family-home standard. I remember peering over his shoulder in the front room and watching him work, and he’d say “Hey look, you can do this, and that, and resize it infinitely etc“, and it just blew my mind. So I learned CorelDraw through him, and then a couple of years later I started to teach myself Adobe Illustrator – the industry standard at the time. I ended up getting into T-Shirt design as a hobby!

And what did I do with that passion for art? well I became a personal trainer obviously, having found the love of fitness at uni. That’s a long story for another time, but the short of it all is that two things: fitness and gaming are my two main priorities in life. I consider myself lucky, because for a lot of people they’re at opposite ends of the spectrum – on the one hand gaming is sitting down all day, and fitness is the exact opposite! The balance is important, for sure.

How did you end up getting into game design from fitness?

Well the majority of my game design work has been with Bewilder Box. We got into the escape room industry back in 2014 when it was still in its infancy here in the UK. It was actually right after we went away for Dave Middleton’s stag do (where we did our first escape room)! We loved the concept to much that we decided to make one ourselves.

In the early days, we were very much learning as we went along, and just did things because we thought they were cool rather than approaching it from a game design perspective. We made our first two rooms – The Initative, and Judgement D.A.V.E. (which can still be played in Brighton), but decided after opening our second that we wanted to branch out a bit because the logistics in opening two rooms were just a nightmare, and commercial property was tough to find in Brighton.

So founded a few spin-off companies –  Bemusement Arcade, Bewilder Boffs (our consultancy), and a third company called Escape Room Go. They all explored escape rooms and puzzles that weren’t constrainted to the four walls of a physical escape room. So imagine mobile escape rooms in briefcases, or experiences that could be spun up to hundreds of players for corporate bookings.

One of my favourites was a mobile experience built into a custom flight case (Push The Button), it was run on COGS and self-resetting, so it didn’t need a host to give as much attention to it as they would in a normal escape room. The clues were icons that would appear on the monitor screen and you’d get a certain amount of time to solve a puzzle before being force-fed the answer. Once you opened up the box, you’d hit the button, complete the puzzle, prompting the next one.  The system would record your time, give you a code, ,and just like Mario Kart’s ghost car you’d be able to plug someone else’s code in to see where your competitors were with a tracking system. That was really cool…but sadly never launched because Covid kind of stopped us in our tracks! Hopefully it will at some point, but as I’m no longer part of Bewilder Box, I can never say.

Right now I’m just taking some time off, but I am about to start a Masters in Game Design at UAL which is really exciting, so watch this space!

So I have to ask from one puzzle designer to another, how do YOU design puzzles? What’s your process?

Yeah, so I really like logic-based puzzles. If anyone has played the puzzle in Judgement DAVE, there’s a cipher puzzle I created I’m really proud of, which is a great example of the type of puzzles I like to design most. There’ll be some slight spoilers for this puzzle – so skip if you haven’t played yet!

I remember back then I just really wanted to come up with a unique cipher. I wanted to make a pattern that fit perfectly involving shapes. I realised if you take the 26 letters of the roman alphabet you can divide it into symmetrical patterns. So I started with 26, worked out a load of patterns involving vertices and corners and then realised I could have a single circle, triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon and septagon with no remainder. (ignoring the 2-sided shape, cos it’s a line). Add dots, and you have yourself a perfect cipher.

Succinctly, I like patterns, numbers and symmetry. A lot of my puzzles are based in mathematics and are cipher based for this reason.

Ooh, I’d love to send you a GMTK game which I think you’ll enjoy in that case! It’s all about numbers and ciphers.

Oh yeah? Great! I was moderating the GMTK community all weekend. Actually, if you’re interested in more puzzle design process I gave a talk to the GMTK community about finding inspiration. One of the inspiration-finding activities I love to practice is to imagine you’re going on a walk and see how you can turn that into a puzzle. I talk through some examples of things you might notice on your walk then examples of real life games that draw from them.  I like to challenge designers to take things from their everyday life and turn it into a puzzle.

I love that! Do you have any other bits of advice you’d like to share?

Originality! For me at least, it shapes the way I think, but I like to come up with unique concepts. When I have an idea the first thing I do is try to figure out if it’s been come before. If it has and I can’t add an original spin, I’ll drop it. It’s quite the claim to say everything I do it original, but at least as a driving force, originality is SUPER important.

Okay, so lets talk more about you as an escape room enthusiast. Please tell me, what was your first ever escape room?

My first ever was called “Trap” in Budapest (the one we did on Dave Middleton’s stag go, I can’t remember the name of the specific room, but it was medieval themed. What was really interesting about it was it was one of the few rooms I’ve played which relied very heavily on skill-based taks. That’s not something I’ve seen a lot in the UK, so I remember this one standing out a lot.

That’s interesting! How do you feel about skill-based games?

It’s a good question, they’re tricky, and can be very frustrating at times. There’s no manner of verbal Game-Mastering that can help you through a skill-based game – you either have the ability, or you don’t. If you get stuck, the Games Master is going to have to come in and solve it for you or just skip past the puzzle completely. I’m not sure how much I enjoy them, but it’s all about balance, right? I’m quite good at throwing things, so those I like!

That’s fair. So how many have you played since Trap?

I think I’ve played between 150 and 200 now. I’ve lost count! I stopped counting at around 75 games. It’s not something I ever thought about tracking. Often I look back now and wish I had kept better track though. I feel the same way about video games. There are hundreds I’ve played and some I’m sure I’ve completely forgotten because I didn’t write them down at the time.

I get that! Personally I use a spreadsheet. But what about any stand-out rooms? Do you remember those?

In the UK, Marvo’s Mysteries is a real standout and they’ll always hold a special place in my heart. I also thought Loot the Lanes in Brighton was fantastic. And of course, the Acid Bath Murderer – the one I just wrote a review for. For me, that experience ticked every single box and I loved it.

You’ve lived outside of the UK and travelled a lot, any favourites outside the UK?

Yeah! Outside the UK the Netherlands is of course a stand-out travel destination for escape rooms. But I have to talk about Barcelona in particular, since I lived there and there are just so many good ones. I haven’t played that many outside of the UK, although I’ve played about 10 in Barcelona, where I lived for a while. My favorites there are Chronologic 1, Vault 27 and Nakatomi Plaza. We had the greatest host of all time in Nakatomi Plaza, I really wish I could remember his name, but it was just *chef’s kiss*.

Alright, I’ll flip the question. Any stand out bad experiences?

Haha yes, I played a hilariously bad one in India this year. We were in Delhi and we just turned up on the day and they put us in this room which was really nothing at all. You had three hints total, and then you weren’t allowed anything more. It was not great, but hey! We managed to succeed in the end, so that was a relief.

Now, you’re a big video gamer so I have to ask: what are your favourite video games?

I’ve been playing Lorelei and the Laser Eyes on your recommendation and I’m just so glad I pushed past the slow intro because I really think it’s a masterpiece. It’s exactly the kind of puzzle solving I love and has such a variety of stuff. There have been so many puzzles in it that actually made me stop and think and go “wow this is actually really taxing!”.

Lorelei really makes you think outside the box, whereas a lot of puzzle games just aren’t that puzzley!

Other than that, Portal 2 is an all time favourite. It’s probably the best puzzle game out there, just not for the puzzles, the story is phenomental. I also enjoyed The Talos Principle, Baba Is You, The Witness, all fantastic. These are just puzzle games too, I love others – the Diablo and Half Life series, Enter The Gungeon, Slay The Spire, Hades…jeez, there’s too many.

How about tabletop puzzle games? Do you play those a lot?

Yeah, I’m a big fan of tabletop games. Actually when I moved to Barcelona I had this idea that I wanted to play more board games, so I started to go to board game evenings. It was a little tricky in Barcelona because even though it was supposed to be an international, 90% of the games were purely in Spanish, and when I went, my Spanish wasn’t good enough yet.

Then coincidentally I befriended this guy called Flint through playing beach volleyball and he told me the same thing about wanting to start playing board games. He went on a mad spending spree and in the space of two years he ended up buying like, 87 board games! Of course we became good mates as a result, I benefited a lot from that and now I’ve played a tonne.

These days I’m really into deckbuilder-style tabletop games.  My particular favourites are Lost Ruins of Arnak, Clank, and the Quest for El Dorado. I’ve just bought Slay the Spire board game too, which is absolutely phenomenal, great recreation of the digital version.

If I gave you a blank cheque to design any sort of experience in the world, what would you create?

Ah, what would be my passion project?

I think what I’d do is make an escape room that nods to several of my favourite point-n-click videos games, as they were my first introduction into the gaming industry. Something like a game from the LucasArts catalogue, you know the old point and click adventure games? I’d pack it full of Easter Eggs! (Ok I know there’s already a couple of Monkey Island ones, so perhaps a Day of the Tentacle homage).

Thanks so much David!