Text: Wei Ying
Offline escape rooms and online indie games can be said to be two different formats. However, there is a company that has done a good job in these two formats across borders, and has achieved a bold leap from offline to online.
This is Mystery's House, an atypical indie game company. Founded in 2012, Mystery House is one of the earliest escape room brands in China, and has developed more than 40 real-life escape room games. However, due to the limited ceiling of the escape room market and the competitive trend of gradual involution, it was decided to transform into an online game in 2019. It was a business venture for the team, but there was no shortage of investors. For example, miHoYo has led the investment in the House of Mystery twice, accounting for 23.63% of the shares, and is the largest shareholder of the House of Secrets.
The transformation of the house of mysteries first started with a puzzle book that integrated online and offline elements, and after achieving good results, it took half a year to create the first puzzle game "Mimo", which received 9.3 points on TapTap. After successfully testing the waters in the online game track, the team went all out to create a national style reasoning game "Mountains and Rivers Travel" in three years, which was released on Steam on January 31 this year. With its captivating storyline, fun detective gameplay, and ink art style, the game quickly became a detective craze in the gaming world. At present, the praise rate of "Mountain and River Travel" on Steam is as high as 97%, and 200,000 units have been sold, far exceeding the team's expectations.
Their adventures have won a win-win situation for both word-of-mouth and the market. After 12 years of content entrepreneurship, from escape rooms, to puzzle books, to online indie games, this team has changed direction in continuous exploration, but the core gene has always been the same, that is, love and persistence in the story. Chen Zhen, co-founder of Mystery, said: "Stories are the core of everything, and everything is skill in addition to stories. ”
This may be the key to their successful transformation. So what enlightenment can the transformation of Mystic House from offline to online bring to content entrepreneurs?
Exit the offline secret room and bet on online games
In 2017, the offline escape room market was in full swing, and many entrepreneurs poured into this fast-growing market. Under the competition of involution, the design of offline secret rooms has become more and more refined, and immersive gameplay methods such as plots, role-playing, and NPCs have emerged in an endless stream, and the unit price of customers has also risen, and some have even reached a high price of hundreds or thousands at a time.
Just when new entrants have a bright vision for the market prospects, Mystery, which entered the game five years earlier and has dozens of offline escape room stores, is thinking about how to transform. At that time, the team encountered two commercialization problems, Chen Zhen, co-founder of Mystery House, said: "The first is that the input-output ratio of a single escape room store is gradually declining, and the investment cost of a single store is getting higher and higher, but the ceiling of revenue is restricted by the ping effect of a single store; ”
These two problems are essentially closely related to the attributes of offline entertainment, and they are the structural dilemmas faced by the escape room industry. After much deliberation, the founding team found that they were most interested in content creation rather than solving business problems. Chen Zhen said, "We hope that the content we develop can be more influential, not just radiate the surrounding users of offline entertainment." Therefore, the House of Mystery began to gradually seek the transformation of the business format.
Initially, the team of Mystery House thought that it was a good way to transform into a VR experience store, which not only retained the form of an offline entertainment store, but also quickly standardized and copied. Therefore, he began to develop VR experience content, and operated nearly 10 VR experience stores, but chose to quit after a year and a half. Chen Zhen said: "We found that the core of escape rooms is socialization, not just puzzle solving. However, VR glasses place players in an unreal environment, isolating the fun of social interaction to a certain extent, which is inconsistent with offline consumption scenarios. In addition, the VR hardware was not very mature at that time, so we chose to quit. ”
During this time, the team also tried a creative project "Beijing Subway Escape", which opened a new breakthrough for the House of Mysteries. "Beijing Subway Escape" is an urban real-life game with the subway as the main line, players can buy puzzle packs, explore the real scene according to the plot guide, and reveal the truth of the story. This format not only opens up the scene restrictions of offline entertainment stores, but also stimulates players' desire and curiosity to explore the city.
Along this business line, Mystic House decided to focus on the layout of puzzle book products. Puzzle book is a kind of linkage product that combines physical books, offline real scenes and mobile apps, players can read the text plot on the mobile app, find clues in the physical book, and combine to complete the puzzle. The House of Mysteries and the Forbidden City have cooperated in the "Labyrinth" series of puzzle books, and riding on the hot east wind of the Forbidden City's IP, the "Labyrinth" series of physical books has sold more than 1 million sets, with a total sales of more than 22 million yuan. The puzzle book, a transition product from offline to online, allowed the team to accumulate a lot of experience in designing games in three years of development.
The team's confidence in transforming online is increasing day by day, and miHoYo's investment in 2019 has given the team the determination to make games. In 2019, the House of Mystery established the Mystery Game Department, formed a six-person game team, and developed the first online puzzle game Mimo in half a year.
Chen Zhen defines it as a game that breaks the dimensional wall, not only breaking the fourth wall in terms of game content, the villain cat monster thief knows that he is part of the game, he will tamper with the game data, causing the player's game to be garbled or exited, and there are also many game elements combined with offline secret rooms in the gameplay, such as a puzzle solving link that requires the player to turn the mobile phone screen upside down and crack the Morse code by recording the mobile phone sound and flash length.
In the release of this game, miHoYo also gave a lot of suggestions and channel support. With the support of shareholders and the determination of the team, Mystery Home began its business transformation in 2018, gradually closing offline escape room stores during the epidemic, and completely exiting the offline format last year, betting all its chips on online games. And this battle of transformation can only be won, not lost.
Telling a good story is more important than fancy gameplay
Three years ago, Mysteries began to build a team to develop Mountain and River Travel, an indie game with a diverse team that includes puzzle book content creators, traditional game developers, and history consultants. Although the origins are different, the most important gene of the team is the story, so half of the members are game content planners.
Because of the emphasis on storytelling, the development process of "Mountain and River Travel" is also very different from many commercial games. Chen Zhen said that many commercial games will first determine the gameplay and system architecture, and then extend the plot according to these two. However, Mountain and River Travel is a plot-oriented independent game, so it is necessary to determine the plot and copywriting first, and then combine the plot to put the gameplay into it, which is more similar to film and television projects. "We thought it was more important to tell a good story than to Fancy's gameplay, so we focused our development on the story, which is what the team is good at. ”
The inspiration for the story of "Mountains and Rivers Travel" did not appear out of thin air, but was born out of a project in collaboration with the Forbidden City. Chen Zhen recalled, "At that time, we were painting a background of the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, and on the basis of these arts, we conceived a mystery story, which could not only give full play to the characteristics of detectives relying on reasoning rather than modern technology to solve crimes, but also intersperse many interesting settings in the era of East and West." ”
The main character, Shen Zhongping, is a traveling detective who returns to China to find clues to the case because of the mysterious death of his brother Shen Bo'an, and solves six cases along the way, and finally uncovers the truth about his brother's death. The interesting character of the travel detective allows players to follow the steps of the protagonist and appreciate the customs of the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China like looking at ink paintings. Chen Zhen bluntly said that the Chinatown universe inspired by "Detective Chinatown" can leave enough space for the sequel of the story and depict the background of the times in more depth.
The first and second cases are about the literary and artistic liberation after the abolition of the imperial examination system, the third case is the national industrial self-improvement under the throat of foreign countries, the fourth case is the ideological emancipation of women to break through feudal patriarchy, and the fifth and sixth cases are anti-drug and national salvation under the opium epidemic, which are connected together to reflect the theme of national self-improvement and arouse the player's deep resonance with that era. The six cases also follow a gradient from low to high in terms of the difficulty of reasoning, so as to lower the game threshold for players as much as possible.
In terms of gameplay and plot advancement, "Mountain and River Travel" also draws on the classic reasoning game "Reversal Referee", using the interesting gameplay of reasoning evidence, thinking hall, and second personality, and the climax of the game's plot are interspersed and blended, so that the player's emotions in the final chapter are pulled to the peak. There is not only the coolness of solving the case, but also the visual shock. Chen Zhen said: "We hope that players who are not lovers of mystery games can also experience the fun of the game from the plot, characters, atmosphere, and art. ”
In general, the House of Mysteries has grasped two important directions at the content level, one is to focus on the stories of small people, and the other is to highlight the interest of history.
For example, Ding Jiangmu of the Hanyang Iron Works worked hard to revitalize the national industry and studied steel-making technology, but was murdered by villains who were greedy for profit; and Shen Bo'an, an idealist who studied abroad, developed a drug for the sake of national health, but was poisoned by foreign capitalists. There are many, many of these little people. It is their feelings of family and country that they stick to in the face of adversity that have created such a magnificent picture of mountains and rivers that has changed from the old to the new. Chen Zhen said: "We don't want to talk about those events and people that are familiar in history books, but focus on those unknown little people in the era. Through the stories of the little people, the background of the era is connected, so that players can experience that this era is real and touchable. ”
Second, in a genre set in real history, the team wanted to break the player's inherent prejudice against that era, so they designed a lot of fun details based on historical facts in the scene. For example, the "Lunar Colony Novel" that appears in the first chapter is a science fiction novel released by Arajiang Diaosu in 1904, which can be called the earliest science fiction novel in China. These intriguing historical details are like little easter eggs, popping up every now and then to surprise players.
The longboard effect can break the circle and spread
A three-year development cycle isn't long for an indie game, but it's a long time for a company that's looking to transform. Especially during the development period of "Mountains and Rivers", the financial situation of the House of Mysteries has not been improving, but fortunately, the new and old shareholders are very supportive of their game, and they believe that the market imagination of the game is greater than that of the escape room.
Burdened with financial pressure, the House of Mysteries must speed up the launch of the game, last November "Mountains and Rivers Travel" launched the first full version of the closed beta, this closed beta players gave a lot of valuable feedback, such as the narrative content, the rhythm of emotional mobilization is not quite right, the villain at the end is not bad enough, even if he defeats him, it seems that there is no sense of accomplishment. So in the last month before the game was launched, the team spent a lot of effort to optimize the portrayal of the final villain, the way of performance, and strengthen the reversal point of the plot, and finally launched the game before the Spring Festival.
Before the game was launched, "Mountain and River Travel" only had about 30,000 wishlists on Steam. Chen Zhen said: "We didn't have high commercial expectations for it at that time, because it neither had the sophistication of a commercial game, nor did it have the same personality as an indie game, and its style was relatively stable. But I didn't expect that after the game was launched, the rave reviews swept in, and many players commented that it was "a domestic "Reversal Referee", and the Steam praise rate was as high as 97%.
Since its release on January 31, "Mountain and River Travel" has sold 200,000 units on Steam, more than double the founding team's expectations. In April, "Mountains and Rivers Travel" will be released as a mobile mobile game, and Chen Zhen believes that the market performance of mobile may be better, "because the story-oriented game operation is relatively simple, and players will be more convenient and relaxed to play on mobile compared to the PC side."
If there is a methodology behind success, Chen Zhen believes that the core point is the longboard. "To make this kind of cultural product, you must have a long enough board. As long as a long board of this product is very prominent enough to impress users, then other shortcomings will be selectively ignored by users. ”
This is especially true for niche products. In the field of games, reasoning games belong to a very niche track, Chen Zhen said: "Niche is a double-edged sword, which means that there may be fewer competitors, but it also means that the potential user base is small. In order to achieve good business results, we must do everything we can to break the circle of communication. ”
The longboard effect is one way, and the other way is to create an IP matrix. Chen Zhen said that the next step of "Mountains and Rivers Travel" is not only the presentation of the game, but also may reach a wider range of people through animation or film and television. This kind of crossover attempt from games to film and television will surely bring new fun and a sense of accomplishment to this company that is keen on challenges.