WORCESTER, Mass. - For their final project of the semester, a group of students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have been getting creative to make a holiday-themed escape room.

The escape room, called ‘Home for the Holidays’, was created by students in the Interactive Media and Game Development Program. Their professor, Melissa Kagen, said they spent most of this semester perfecting the art.

“They played some conventional escape rooms, and then they also played a lot of experimental, subversive, interactive experiences that weren't quite escape rooms, but that gave them a sense of all of the different kinds of experiences a player might have,” Kagen said. “For example, a piece of interactive or immersive theater, different kinds of environmental storytelling that they could bring into the room, ways that they could maybe make the experience cozy rather than competitive.”

The hands-on experience asks those who enter to think on their feet in a race against the clock. At first, what appears to be a visit with the family evolves into a series of challenges cooked up by students, whose roles included writing, designing, acting, set dressing, directing and prop making.

Some students even sit in the escape room repeating hints, but they don’t interact with the players themselves.

“They were really interested in them because they thought they could maybe be clues or puzzles or they could hold extra meaning,” Kagen said. “I think that what you want as a designer is to give players that gratifying and satisfying sense that the world is as enchanted and charged with meaning, as you maybe thought it was as a child.”

The project has also taught masters students like Samin Shahriar Tokey how interactive environments and experiences can have uses outside the escape room in the fields of education, health care and the arts. The students will tell you the project was anything but easy to create.

“Most of us thought that this was not going to happen,” Tokey said. “Ultimately, the work and the grind we all put in to make it happen, it was really wholesome for us when it actually happened. When we all came together, worked together and put out fires, it was really fulfilling.”

The escape room will be open until Dec. 10.