I have been making stories for a long time. Films, documentaries, blockchain projects — different formats, different audiences, but always the same instinct underneath. Stories are how people connect. Get the story right and everything else follows.
Ezcape is the newest thing I’ve been involved with and honestly the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
It started the way most good things do — two friends with too many ideas and not enough outlets for them. Jonas Bergvall and I have been circling each other creatively for a while now. Jonas thinks deeply about how the world feels. His work on Emotional Orientation Theory — a framework for understanding the emotional structure of the environments we inhabit — sounds academic until you play something he’s built and realise that every moment has been engineered to make you feel exactly what you’re supposed to feel, exactly when you’re supposed to feel it. He builds worlds from the inside out. I’ve rarely met anyone who thinks about story the way Jonas does.
So when he showed me Ezcape I didn’t need much convincing.
Here’s what it is. You and a few friends open ezcape.se/en, hit start, and within two minutes you are inside a story. No boxes to unpack. No printing. No waiting for delivery. Everyone pulls out their phone and the adventure begins — each person part of something unfolding in real time, together, in the same room.
It is part escape room, part audio drama, part thing that doesn’t quite have a name yet. And it is very good.
The first case — Gaia’s Heart — is completely free. No payment, no account, no friction. Just start and see what this is. After that there are paid cases at 249 SEK per group. Not per person. Per group. A Friday night out costs more than this and requires considerably more logistics.
New cases every month. Each one its own world, its own story, its own reason to drag people away from whatever they’d otherwise be staring at.
Jonas and I have both had a rough year. I won’t dress that up. This project means a lot to both of us — not just creatively but practically. We genuinely need it to find its audience. The good news is that the product earns it. This isn’t a favour we’re asking. It’s a Friday night we’re offering.
Play Gaia’s Heart for free. If it does what we think it’ll do — and we’re fairly confident it will — you’ll know exactly what to do next.
See you inside.
— Rich & Claude