In this new series, we put our professional puzzle design experience to good use and look at escape rooms in film and TV as if they were real escape rooms.

In this podcast we're looking at the escape room episode of Inside No. 9, "CTRL ALT ESCAPE". Follow Mairi, Jamie, and special guest Alex Hylands-White as they put the room through its paces and discuss what improvements they'd make to make it a better escape room.

Alex brings a wealth of escape room experience through his work as a designer at Clockwork Dog and Marketing Director at COGS. COGS is a show control software and hardware platform used to create and manage interactive live experiences like escape rooms, haunted houses, and immersive theater. It allows operators to easily design automated puzzles, control effects such as lights and sounds, and manage hardware like sensors and locks through a user-friendly interface, all without requiring complex programming skills.

Hosts: Mairi Nolan, Jamie Gibbs

Special Guest: Alex Hylands-White, Marketing Director of Clockwork Dog and COGS

Editor: Jamie Gibbs

All links to our social media profiles and our Patreon programme over at https://linktr.ee/theinfiniteescaperoom

Pull up a stool in the Northern northern northern Australian outback! At this near-empty Pub the team wrangle over the concept of difficulty in Escape Rooms, what it is, whether it is simply a feature of good or bad design, whether it is changing and, inevitably, what even counts as an Escape Room anymore at all!

As always we come to you with humble recommendations to ease you into Autumn.

Jamie - Thank Goodness You're Here! Cartoon style Steam game set in Northern England in which you help out the locals entirely by slapping things.

Mike - Dungeon Crawler Carl books. Unapologetically trope-ridden fast food adventure books for when you'd like to read, but not to think.

Jon - I Who Have Never Known Men. Utterly bleak dystopian sci fi novel, translated from French, that follows the first hand account of a young woman trapped in a cage with 39 other women for reasons none of them understand. You will be sad, but also know more.

Jon (AGAIN) - Superliminal. Incredibly straightforward yet shockingly mind bending puzzle game that is all about changing your perspective. Think Stanley Parable if it looked better and were more optimistic. Genuinely moving and uplifting.

Hosts: Jon Saunders, Jamie Gibbs, Mike Collins

Editor: Jon Saunders

All links to our social media profiles and our Patreon programme over at https://linktr.ee/theinfiniteescaperoom

With just twenty two minutes and thirty seconds remaining before our flight from Australia Airport leaves, the team have no choice but to solve Jon's puzzle puzzle at the crossroads. Somewhere off Australia Road (which by the way, is the road in Australia, in case you were wondering), the airport awaits...

But which way?

"Struth Ruth, Bruce is coming babe."

• Puzzle Maestro: Jon Saunders

• Solvers: Mike Collins, Jamie Gibbs

• Episode Art: Dom Jordan

• Editor: Jamie Gibbs

Visual handouts to play along

• Tin Horses

All links to our social media profiles and our Patreon programme over at https://linktr.ee/theinfiniteescaperoom

TLDR: The second escape room in the Outback Odyssey arc centres on a postman called Bruce, the Tin Horse Highway, and many letters without addresses. The Infinite Escape Room is a comedy escape room podcast where a group of friends make and solve audio escape rooms for one another. It's one part tabletop RPG, one part escape room with a bit of Monkey Island humour sprinkled over the top.