What would you do if you found yourself in a locked room with a dead body, and only an hour to solve the crime before you got framed for the murder yourself? That’s the premise of an ambitious interactive story called Framed, which will be played out on Facebook at 8pm tonight.
“It’s the world’s first interactive escape room murder mystery”, says Rachel Walker, Head of Production at Social Life, who have created the project with UKTV’s Alibi channel to launch a new season of the crime drama Crossing Lines.
If the phrase “interactive escape room murder mystery” doesn’t exactly convey what you can expect, I got a chance to try a rehearsal version.
In Framed, you view the world through the eyes of a security guard, and pretty quickly you move from choosing his drink to discovering a body. You have to make sense of the clues littered around the room where the crime has taken place.
For the test I was able to issue voice commands, which the character and narrator voiceover responded to. But the live event sounds far more complicated.
They are hoping thousands will take part, and the on-screen action will be guided in part by moderators picking out comments from the audience. Facebook’s reaction buttons will also be used to carry out snap polls of what the character should do next.
Framed was written by David Varela, who says: “Escape room experiences are usually designed for small groups, so creating a story on this scale meant taking the game to another level. Allowing thousands of people to take part at once should produce really exciting results, and we’re looking forward to some heated arguments about the different choices our character can make.”
The story’s open-ended nature doesn’t faze Sam Pearson, a TV and Digital Content Producer at UKTV. Framed is intended to last from 8pm to 9pm, when Crossing Lines starts on linear TV – but the team are relaxed about the crime being solved sooner. “In a way that will just prove our premise, that the audience are a bunch of brilliant amateur detectives.”
Pearson said that one of the driving ideas behind Framed, which has taken a couple of months to put together, was that feeling, when watching detective shows, that the audience are always racing to try and solve the crime before the on-screen protagonists.
The project also builds upon an idea the team tested out in the summer, using the #Twurder hashtag to allow users to shape a murder myster story.
Pearson is confident that the combined wisdom of the audience will get the main character off the hook. “If they go way off-beam, the story is constructed so the narrator can gently head them in the right direction. There’s a lot in there to be discovered, including some easter eggs hidden around the place.”
As text-based adventures go, it’s all come a long way from typing “Go north” into computers and getting frustrated that Thorin has sat down to start singing about gold.
So how did I fare on the case?
Well, without giving any spoilers away, I expect to be inside for a very long stretch.
- “Framed” launches on 13 October 2016 at 8pm on facebook.com/alibichannel
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