Venture into a Japan-inspired escape room from the team at Ukiyo, as we interview the creator behind The Crumbling Prince!
The Crumbling Prince is a fantasy Japan-inspired escape room in Melbourne. A hand-crafted adventure that truly feels different from the other escape rooms that have been popularised over recent years. It’s a much more story-driven, atmospheric puzzle room with a fantastic use of AI technology. Each player is given a different mask that let you interact with the room in unique ways. I had a chat with Michael Armstrong, the creator of Ukiyo, the company that manages the escape room, to get a grasp of his creative world.
Zahra: Hello! Thank you for letting me ask you a couple of questions. I first wanted to ask you, what was the impetus for creating your company, Ukiyo? As per your website, Ukiyo is the Japanese word for ‘fleeting’ and ‘transient’. It is also a word used in Japanese renga poetry. What meaning do you use for it?
Michael: I’d say it was my childhood. As a kid, I spent a lot more time imagining I was in a video game world rather than playing actual video games. In what would probably seem absurd to kids of this era, I was restricted to twenty minutes a week, lest I become ‘addicted.’ Spending so much time outside, I came up with this idea. Why couldn’t you just make a video game in real life and rather than programming it, build it physically. That would have been the first sprouting of the idea of Ukiyo in my head.
The word Ukiyo for me is about creating these ‘floating worlds’. A place where people can visit or escape from the repetitive cycles of life. Where people can enter another universe and engage in the craft of the artists and designers who have built it. That’s kind of the historical meaning of the word and I really wanted that to be the goal we aim for. A secret dream of mine would be for Japanese food stalls, bathhouses and other makers to open around Ukiyo and make it this special place that people travel to. Like a Japan-inspired fantasy realm in Melbourne.
Zahra: Some apparent big influences to your works are of course, Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, but are there any other influences you could tease out for me?
Michael: My favourite game growing up as a kid was Majora’s Mask on Nintendo 64. There was something in the world that was so enthralling. It was dark, it gave me nightmares but it was also so emotional and grieving. Characters had minimal dialogue relative to these days but as they reflected on the end of the world their dialogue was so poignant, it hit so hard. Everytime I boot it up, I get flooded with these feelings of nostalgia and a return to my childhood. I absolutely love it.
Clearly the masks had a big impact on me as well as The Crumbling Prince is all about the players putting on a mask and becoming something completely different with different abilities and a new look. So that was definitely a big inspiration for The Crumbling Prince and now Sonata of Shadows.
Some other influences that I’d highly recommend watching or reading would be Mushi-shi, Angel’s Egg, and two stories by Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and The Fisherman and His Soul.
Zahra: I know you probably can’t tell me too much, but could you reveal how you made the AI to the illustrious prince?
Michael: To answer that question, I’m going to have to go earlier than the Prince to Columbus who was my first character in the original Deep Space that no longer exists. With Deep Space, I really wanted to transport visitors to another world where they could forget they were in a game and engage with a character, an ‘artificial intelligence,’ or what we now refer to as non-human NPCs.
In Deep Space, Columbus was the ship’s AI, left alone in the dank, lonely corridors of the ship while the humans slept in cryo-sleep waiting for honour and glory. He was a character wrestling with his own free will and the fact that he was a slave to the humans who made him and a slave to his own body, trapped in this crevice in the ship.
It’s a very different idea of AI to what we now associate with things like ChatGPT and Dall-E. Behind Columbus there was a lot of love and artistry in a weird mix between theatre, dungeon mastering and choose-your-own-adventures. There’s the thousands of options of dialogue written by me when I was an optimistic 19-year-old, and then the darker edits and tonal shifts from my best friend Beth to balance it. There’s the passionate voice acting of Columbus by Trevor Major who threw himself into this unheard-of project with such belief and our Ukiyo hosts who like expert puppeteers lived the ‘AI’ Columbus for so many years,
And it’s the same for the Prince, Hikaru, Enkidu and the NPCs we’re working on for Sonata of Shadows. These are beautifully flawed characters with so much passion and energy poured into them. We want them to live, to explore the dark and sunny spots of life, and to take the players, our guests on a wonderful journey deep into themselves. But I don’t think we’ve fully gotten there yet.
Many players come out having a great time, and a few come out changed. But I really want the journeys at Ukiyo to be this safe fantasy space where guests can think, feel and engage with the real-life struggles they’re going through. Where they open up conversations in families and friendships long after the experience. Where guests can leave more compassionate for the world around them, and be empowered to attach rather than detach themselves to the beauty of life.
Zahra: You’re currently working on (Sonata of Shadows) the third part to The Crumbling Prince. I believe when my group had a sneak peak, Dark Souls was mentioned as a possible influence. Could you reveal anything more?
Michael: For sure! Me and the rest of the team are super keen for Sonata of Shadows. It follows on after the reveals of The Crumbling Prince and takes players away from the beauty and idyllic nature of the Prince’s garden to the darker reality of the world. In that sense, it’s a bit like starting in Kokiri Forest in Ocarina of Time and plunging into the harsher setting of Dark Souls.
Sonata has a large chorus of characters and is by far our most ambitious project to boot. It’ll be the first time players get to carry NPCs around with them as little sidekicks, and we’re bringing them to life with some talented voice acting, responsiveness, and mechatronics. We’re also in conversation with a couple of the voice actors from the FromSoftware games to possibly jump on board and that is hella exciting.
Two other ways we’re looking to reinvent the wheel are with a save system, where players can save their current progress and continue the next visit and lastly, a full-on boss fight. The original Deep Space had a finale akin to a mini-boss fight where you had to terminate Columbus before he gassed you. In Sonata of Shadows however, we’re shooting for the moon and we’ll be trying to create a real-life boss fight with a mix of projections, puppetry and special effects.
You’ll be in your party of friends and NPCs using your abilities and teamwork to defeat a boss called Many Faces. It might be hard to picture this without having visited Ukiyo, but that is both the magic and the challenge of it and we are thrilled to push this medium to the brink.
Thank you very much Michael for a peek into Ukiyo! You can find out more about the escape room via the official Ukiyo website.
