Unlock Bath: Built From Beneath

In Summer 2022, Echo Games CIC worked closely with museums in and around Bath to co-design a digital escape room about the historical development of the city. Generously supported by the Bristol + Bath Creative R+D Trailblazer fund, Unlock Bath playfully connects stories on the geological formation of Bath Stone, the life of local miners, and the evolution of regional industrial transport.

Unlock Bath supports a growing desire within the heritage sector to apply games as a way to express local histories and encourage new audiences to engage museum collections. This is something that larger cultural institutions typically have the resources to explore, yet small-to-medium sized museums do not, and in turn are too often left behind. Disrupting this pattern, Unlock Bath engages five organisations - BRLSI, Radstock Museum, The Museum of Bath at Work, the Museum of Bath Stone, and Bath Medical Museum.

The process of creating Unlock Bath began with a period of ‘co-discovery’. Here we (Echo Games CIC) hosted a participatory workshop in which museum partners exchanged stories and shared perspectives on the historic moments that made Bath what it is today. Besides being a catalyst for developing the narrative of Unlock Bath, this was for some museums the first time that they had the opportunity to meet one another face-to-face. A exciting result of this therefore was the initiation of collaborations that reach beyond this project. Great news for all involved!

Following ‘co-discovery’ came ‘co-design’. This involved working with artists, writers, and heritage professionals to craft a story that connects the diverse collections of our museum partners. This was by no means an easy task, however it was an incredibly rewarding one that revealed a lot about the history of Bath. Who knew for example that Bath Stone can be blue in certain conditions?! We leaned into this fact in the narrative of Unlock Bath, which positions the player as a future researcher tasked to travel back in time to understand the origins of a mysterious blue stone.

The ‘co-design’ stage led to the development of game mechanics. Being a digital escape room, Unlock Bath is all about solving puzzles, collecting items, and opening zones. These puzzles vary in topic and mode of interaction - from memory games where the player recalls the steps needed to make Dr Willam Oliver’s famous Bath Oliver biscuit, to reaction games where they must mine as much coal as possible before the air becomes unbreathable. All this centres around an illustrated map of Bath that populates as puzzles are completed and new areas of the game are unlocked - first we see rivers, then come quarries, mines, and the architecture of the city. Importantly, each element of the game offers accurate and relevant historical information curated by museum partners.

So where do we go from here? Echo Games CIC is committed to helping museums develop digital offerings that engage audiences through imagination and play. We like to work with smaller cultural institutions who rarely get such support - making games for them but also providing the tools and insight needed to craft interactive experiences of their own. Unlock Bath and projects like it are critical in supporting the continuing operation of these museums, and to ensure that regional heritage is told by a diverse range of voices and perspectives. So we invite you to play the game, but equally, we encourage you to visit these wonderful museums and see for yourself how vividly they bring the story of Bath to life.

If you’d like to learn more about Unlock Bath and play the game, visit https://echogames.co.uk/unlock-bath/.