Sanrio Lab
A labyrinth experience inside the Sanrio characters’ minds.
Lucca Comics is the most epic Italian event of the year for anyone involved in games.
Along with Game Week and the Play Festival, it helped create a trend of amazing festivals and is the most important one in Italy, with almost the same amount of visitors as the Salone del Mobile in Milan– the most important Italian exhibition overall.
In 2015 we attended the festival and put on a production.
We were invited by Nicola Ciancio, a friend with whom we work in NonRiservato.
He called us with an idea: instead of proposing an average activity for his Sanrio client, Nicola wanted to create a maze for the Sanrio visitors, and who better than we could help him?
He wanted a challenge that was not easy to overcome, but without enemies—rather, only puzzles similar to an Escape Room.
So the SanrioLab was born, a game for 10 players engaged in a race against time to save the memory of Sanrio characters by solving various puzzles.
The production was directed by Nicola and his staff, while Urban Games Factory focused on gameplay and puzzles.
Then it was time to go to Lucca and make it happen!
The SanrioLab was open during the four days of the festival, welcoming thousands of participants who waited hours in line to be able to participate; the news had spread and ours was one of the most popular visitor attractions at the festival.
Watching Maleficent, Han Solo and other co-players get lost in the maze of Hello Kitty’s memory was surreal.
Not to mention that we were masked and dressed as cognitive doctors and that the spaces were a tub of polystyrene balls, a disco with strobe lights and distorting mirrors and a lab from which smoke and neon lights streamed nonstop.
Memory is a very interesting place!
Credits
Sanrio Lab – Escape Maze.
Game Design by Matteo Uguzzoni.
Produced by Sanrio.
Artistic direction by Nicola Ciancio.
Performances by Matteo Uguzzoni, Mercuzio Peron