Escape Key Project F - FIre Extinguisher

This week's challenge for the Escape Key project was to create a fire extinguisher puzzle. Naturally, that meant getting my hands on a fire extinguisher first.

Now, my family is fairly used to strange objects turning up at home, but a fire extinguisher might be the most unusual delivery yet. I picked one up on eBay—surprisingly, there are quite a few available—and I chose it because I wanted an object that would normally exist in an office or escape room, but which players might initially ignore as standard equipment. It blends in… until it doesn’t.

Of course, I had to consider how to show that it’s not in service while still clearly making it a puzzle. I think the final design strikes that balance well. It’s obviously a fire extinguisher, but there’s something just unusual enough about it to draw the eye.

Label Design and Software Experimentation

I used Affinity Designer to create the custom label. I’ve been an Adobe Illustrator user for a long time, but I wanted to try Affinity—and I was pleasantly surprised. It felt simpler, more intuitive, and had clever features like measurement scales when moving objects—perfect for this level of precision.

I stripped the original label text and transferred it into a text file, aligning it with a reference alphabet so I could remove specific letters. The idea was to remove one letter—obvious enough that players could work it out from context. For example, carbon dioxide still reads reasonably well even if you remove the “D” from “dioxide”—so I removed the D.

I printed two versions of the label: one plain, and one with a gloss finish. The gloss finish was the clear winner, blending beautifully with the extinguisher’s surface. Once glued into place on the cleaned extinguisher, it looked polished and realistic—exactly what I hoped for.

Hidden Meaning and Puzzle Design

The original extinguisher brand was “Chubb,” a well-known UK brand. I wanted a name with a similar feel—so I went with "Omitt", referencing the puzzle’s core mechanic: omitting a letter. I originally considered colouring the letters (e.g. yellow) instead of removing them entirely, but leaving them out made the puzzle harder and more satisfying.

In future iterations, I may design two versions: one with coloured letters for beginner or family teams, and one with omitted letters for more experienced players.

Solving Strategy and Playtest Plans

This puzzle is deceptively tricky. Solving it involves two mental strategies:

1. Identifying the letters on the label.

2. Keeping a tally of which letters are present to spot which is missing.

Escape rooms often include a plastic slate or wipeable notepad for players to jot things down, and I suspect this puzzle will require something like that. It adds a tactile, analog charm to what is essentially a logic deduction under pressure.

My hope is that it hits that perfect escape room note—frustrating in the right way. Challenging, but fair. Pressure that builds because players put it on themselves.

Now it just needs some playtesting. I’m keen to see how quickly people identify the missing letter—and whether they love it or want to throw the extinguisher across the room!

Let me know your thoughts in the comments. What would you change? What did you like? What might you improve?