Since the early 2010s, many people in Japan have played ARG-like games that blur the boundary between the game world and the real world. One of the most commercially successful examples is SCRAP’s Real Escape Game, typically described as a game in which players, acting as “protagonists” of a particular “story,” attempt to escape by solving puzzles. Yet the precise role of “story” or "narrative" in these games remains ambiguous. This article examines how “narrative” functions as a tool of the trade in Real Escape Games, and in particular how high school students conceptualize and employ it when creating their own games. Drawing on Salen and Zimmerman’s theoretical framework of games as narrative play, we first clarify the characteristics of “narratives” in Real Escape Games. We then conduct a text-mining analysis of the proposals submitted to the National High School Real Escape Game Creators Championship, in order to investigate how students position and utilize “narratives” in their original designs. The analysis reveals two key findings: (1) students create their games by adopting or appropriating the fixed “story events” of solving puzzles and escaping, and (2) they reinterpret everyday reality from the perspective of a “fictional world,” thereby identifying resources to construct the fictional settings of their games.