Entertaining, immersive, and innocent for some, suspiciously modern and dangerous for others, Escape and Puzzle Rooms are a worldwide phenomenon that, in Europe, has found the biggest markets in Hungary (Nicholson, 2015) and Poland. Despite their increasing popularity, ERs have been predominantly considered a business practice, a form of entertainment, and an educational tool. The majority of publications focus on financial aspects, construction, puzzles creation, or team-building potential (e.g., Byrd, 2016; Clare, 2016; Jackson, 2016; Hamer-Morton, 2018; Jackson & Drake, 2019; Kalugin, 2019); some scholars have traced the roots of Escape Rooms (e.g., Nicholson 2015; Klemp 2017). Their educational potential, especially for museums and libraries, is also beginning to be recognized (e.g., Borrego,Fernández, Blanes & Robles, 2017; Johnson 2017; Monaghan & Nicholson, 2017; Walsh, 2017; Kroski, 2018; Nicholson 2018). However, the body of secondary literature remains somewhat limited. In this essay, I would like to dissect how escape rooms can serve as a rhetorical tool and a mirror for political discourses. First, I will discuss the relationship between educational escape rooms and teaching history in ideological terms. Then the focus will move to the ways in which Polish history-teaching escape rooms have become parts of the dominant discourse of the ruling Law and Justice party (further: PiS). Next, I will argue that this discourse is, in fact, a coherent retelling of history through different media that creates a strong narrative and offers a simple identity scheme. In places where the narrative offered by the official discourse is inflexible, nationalistic, and based on mythologized “national heroes,” government-funded educational escape rooms might strongly demonstrate a variety of rhetorical influences. Simultaneously, rooms organized by those ideologically aligned with those who do not share the political views of the government might display the same rhetorical practices while conveying a different message.
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