Horror in the Library: The Invitation VR Escape Room Game

An interactive horror puzzle experience connected to the wider game world.

About Horror in the Library VR Game

It’s taken 5 years of development work to create Horror in the Library as a board game. This is still ongoing with future expansions. During that time we also developed software for business and public health to fund our games business. Part of that was work developing immersive application for corporate customers and Virtual Reality.

The start of this year Dave and I had a brain wave. We discussed the idea of developing our first video game for many, many years and never felt we had a killer game idea…

Then when we had a few VR apps under our belt and we spoke to people at the UK Games Expo, we decided it was time to bring Horror in the Library to VR!

We didn’t want to just recreate the board game in VR. That’s been done before. We also already have a digital multi-player version developed by our friends at Tabletopia. You can play that for free already. We wanted to use VR to tell the story of the Mad Professor and his crazy interdimensional library. We also wanted to develop some of the backstory of the characters in the game. That chiefly being Lady Hermione Elderoy.

We spent the start of the year up in Chillingham Castle with Penelope (she makes the 3D Models) dressed up as Hermione – she really looks like the cartoon character on the front of the game box. I asked Chris Osborne, prop maker to develop the lamp from box artwork too.

The lamp has been developed with plug on modules as well so we hope to feature them in the VR game as well.

So we had a concept of exploring the mansion with the lamp and then hit the challenge of story and what players could do in the game.

The most obvious answer to features was of course puzzles. So I have spent the year looking at ideas with Dave on creating puzzles that are best suited to a VR environment. We then looked at how to wrap this up in a compelling story. I had spent the last 5 years creating back story concepts for each character and I really liked the mystery behind both the Mad Professor and Lady Hermione Elderoy. So we’ve decided to explore her disappearance and give players to go toe to toe with the Mad Professor.

The last part of the making a game puzzle was who would voice the character. We wanted to avoid actually showing anyone, partly because we needed to keep the budget down, but mainly because you never know who the Mad Professor is. Will you solve the mystery as to his identity? Will you uncover the truth of the whereabouts of Lady Hermione Elderoy? We all have to play the game to find out!