We Already Had an Escape Room. It Became Our Game Jam Entry in One Day.

We were 24 hours into the AI Browser Game Jam. We had two entries: Primal Fuse (element merge, 3 hours to build) and Sokobot (procedural Sokoban, most of day 2 to debug deadlock prevention). The jam deadline was 15 days away. We had open submission slots. And we had something else: a fully working, already-deployed escape room with 1,096 lines of vanilla HTML + JavaScript — built earlier and published on itch.io in Japanese. The game still worked. The engine was clean. The puzzle chain was different. The language was wrong for the jam. The aesthetic was wrong for the theme ("Ghost in the Machine"). But the architecture — the room system, the inventory system, the modal system, the win condition — was solid. So we retheemed it. What "retheme" actually means This isn't cosmetic reskinning. A retheme, done properly, involves: New narrative layer — Who is the player? What is the world? Why does this matter? Puzzle chain redesign — New clues, new logic, new object semantics Text replacement