Escape Rooms TV — press kit

Logline

An escape room built for the sofa, not ported from a phone: a 1950s detective case you solve out loud with the people next to you, on the big screen, with the Siri Remote.

Short description (50 words)

Escape Rooms TV brings the escape room to the living room. In The Copied Library — free, in full — a 500-year-old book has vanished from a college library in 1954. Explore painted rooms, question suspects and crack the locks together, with the Siri Remote. Fully voiced in English and German.

Description (150 words)

Escape Rooms TV is a detective escape room made for Apple TV. It was designed from the start for the Siri Remote and the sofa — no cursor, no on-screen keyboard, no phone port — and for the way people actually play on a television: together, talking, pointing at the screen.

The first case, The Copied Library, is free to play in full. Ashcombe College, autumn term 1954: a book of hours five hundred years old has gone from the Havelock Library, and the college would rather recover it before the police, the press or the donors hear a word. Players walk richly painted rooms, question the people in them, and work out what they are not telling them. Locks, codes and questions belong to the story; a hint is always one press away; a notebook remembers what has been found.

Every line is performed, with separate English and German casts, so the German version is a German game, not a subtitled one. Per-player profiles and age limits make it a family game (9+). No ads, no tracking, no account; it runs entirely offline.

Key points

• Made for the television: painted 1080p rooms, a focus model tuned for the Siri Remote, and puzzles meant to be solved by a group on a sofa. Press Play/Pause and the room lists everything you can select.
• A full case, free: about an hour of play with two endings, no paywall and no in-app purchase in this release.
• Two casts: English and German are separate performances, not a dub of one another; the hint character, Inspector Charles Quill, speaks each room in once.
• Family-first: profiles per player, age limits behind a PIN, nothing collected, nothing sent anywhere.
• Small studio, couch-tested: every scene was played on a real sofa by real families before release; further Inspector Quill cases are in production.

The story (spoiler-free)

Autumn term, 1954. You and Inspector Charles Quill are called to the Havelock Library at Ashcombe College by Dr Helen Ashby, the College Librarian, who would say almost nothing on the telephone. A book is missing. The catalogue says one thing, the shelves another, and not everyone at the college is pleased to be disturbed. The case takes you from the reading room to the closed stacks and further down than you expected — and ends with a train to catch.

About the studio

Tidy Disaster Games is the games label of Desatec Systems GmbH, a small software studio in Göttingen, Germany. Escape Rooms TV is its first game for Apple TV; art, music and voices are produced in-house, and the next cases — and a very different second game — are in production.