Welcome back to the next issue of Escape Rooms Australia.
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Portal
Get in to the lab and shut it down before it’s too late
Scientists have unwittingly opened a portal to another dimension whose inhabitants are extremely hostile to say the least. As the only team left, can your group work together to close the portal before they take over Earth?
Epilepsy caution | Flashing lights
Multi-linear experience
Suggested groups of 5 or 6
Suggested team dress up in black!
Players: 3-8
Difficulty: 4/5
Suggested Ages: Rated PG | Open to all ages
Duration: 70 Minutes
Jurassic Island
Retrieve one of the last dinosaur eggs from the abandoned Jurassic Island. Are you brave enough to face this challenge?
Players: 4-10
Difficulty: 4/5
Suggested Ages: There are no lower player age limits for children accompanied by an adult in any capacity. For teams where all players are aged 13 years old and over, we do not require an adult to play, provided a responsible adult remains onsite.
Duration: 60 Minutes
Jungle Escape
Enter the jungle, roll the dice and navigate through the wildest game you’ll ever play!
Players: 4-10
Difficulty: 3/5
Suggested Ages: There are no lower player age limits for children accompanied by an adult in any capacity. For teams where all players are aged 13 years old and over, we do not require an adult to play, provided a responsible adult remains onsite.
Duration: 60 Minutes
Murder at Chateau Noir
You are secretly invited to an exclusive wine-tasting in the private wine cellar of Château Noir, an estate renowned for its world famous vintages and dark secrets. The evening takes a chilling turn when the estate’s eccentric owner, Lionel Le Noir, is found dead in the tasting room—his body surrounded by Police Tape.
The doors slam shut, and a voice echoes through the hidden intercom system. It’s Victoria, Lionel’s estranged assistant, who accuses one of you, of being involved in the murder. She reveals that the cellar is rigged with a deadly mechanism—at the end of the countdown, a toxic gas will be released, unless the true murderer is identified. Victoria claims this is Lionel’s final “game” to reveal the traitor among his guests.
EXTRA GAME OPTION
Players: 2-8
Difficulty: Medium
Suggested Ages: 8 yrs +
Duration: 50 Minutes
Nautilus
Welcome, brave explorers. For decades, Captain Nemo’s legendary Nautilus has slumbered in this silent abyss—an engineering marvel said to run not on ordinary fuel, but a living creature. Your mission is clear: with your captain at the helm, you must uncover the secrets of the Nautilus, revive the submarine’s engine, and guide the Nautilus safely back to port. But tread carefully—this submarine may be dormant, but its mysterious ways still stirs beneath the waves.
Players: 2-6
Difficulty: 4/5
Suggested Ages: We recommend participants be ages 10 years old and above.
Notes: Flashing lights cannot be disabled.
Duration: 60 Minutes
Breathtaker
Note: This brand new game is located in 81 Plenty Rd Preston (Not South Yarra).
Breathtaker is our most ambitious Escape Room experience yet. More actors, more space, this game runs for over 2 hrs.
Following on from the events of our “Bloodline” game, Breathtaker continues the saga and plunges you straight back into the action.
A mysterious pharmaceutical company in Preston, Melbourne, is inviting small tour groups to explore their high-tech facility. They claim a “breakthrough in biomedical science that will revolutionise humanities future lies in wait” for all those who reply to their cryptic invitations. The operation is extremely secretive, and to enter, you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and a comprehensive waiver form. The thing is, none who have entered on these tours have ever been seen again.
Something is wrong. It’s time we infiltrate one of these tour groups to see for ourselves.
Players: 6-14
Scary Level: (1-5): 2-5 adjustable
Suggested Ages: 14 Years
Game Price (no weekend or public holiday surcharge):
6-9 Players $89/ppl
10-14 Players $84/ppl
If you cancel the game on the day, the full amount may be deducted from your card. Please notify us of any change at least 24 hours before the game session.
Drugs & Alcohol –
Guests under the influence of drugs or alcohol will be refused entry or asked to leave. This decision is at the discretion of management and is taken seriously to ensure the safety of our actors.
Pregnancy –
We advise pregnant guests not to participate in our actor-led Escape Rooms.
Important Note: Horror game, live actors in this game
Duration: 125 Minutes
The Mad Magician
Step into the enigmatic world of The Mad Magician, where illusions blend with reality, and nothing is as it seems.
You and your team have unwittingly stumbled into the dressing room of a renowned illusionist, only to find yourselves trapped! The Magician is trapped by his assistant Igor, who is impersonating him on stage. Your job is to help him escape and stop Igor before its too late.
With time running out, you must unravel his cryptic puzzles and navigate a series of mesmerizing tricks to find the hidden passage to the backstage. Can you outsmart the master of deception before he makes you disappear forever?
Players: 2-6
Difficulty: Easy to Hard, 3 levels – Step into the magician’s world!
Suggested Ages: Perfect for ages 8 to 80, with enchanting puzzles and plenty of fun for all.
Rules: Please ensure your entire group arrives 15 minutes prior to your scheduled time. No large bags, food or drinks (except bottled water is permitted in the room).
The audience is waiting—will you be the stars of the show or just another vanished act? The curtain is rising, and the clock is ticking!
Duration: 60 Minutes
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The Adventure of Loose Party Plans!
It’s time to party!
I recently celebrated a milestone birthday, and as such, took the opportunity to subject as many of my friends as possible to an afternoon of puzzling. I’m sure many of us have been there, and taken advantage of getting to call the shots to share our favourite things with our favourite people who might not otherwise have been able to get involved. But how do you manage multiple escapees? Here are some points to consider when planning an escape with big numbers.
Get This Party Started
First up, where are we going? The venue choice is going to be the biggest factor on your numbers. Some great venues have opened up around Australia recently but still only have one or two rooms available. Whereas some other venues you could book out and have groups doing different escape rooms concurrently. Look at the maximum team numbers for each room and then add them up. They say “the more, the merrier”, but also consider “the more, the higher likelihood you need to book back-to-back rooms to fit everyone in at the same venue”.
Alternatively, challenge rooms, outdoor puzzle hunts, and city-based walking experiences are the main non-escaping-but-still-puzzle-based options and typically can take big numbers. (I had 70+ at an outdoor puzzle hunt)
Many Escape Room companies now have dedicated group areas, bookable for parties and functions. Some even have their own bar! If they don’t, ask the staff for their recommended local feeding and drinking spots.
Crowd Control
Especially if you are at a dedicated venue, it’s worth lining up your guests into teams ahead of the day. Sorting by those who already know each other is always safest – unless you’re trying to get people to mingle based on other criteria. Having a set start time is great, and consider for those guests who may have kids whether to factor in their timing with the little ones, or to recommend they call on the grandparents to help out that day.
The more planning you can do here ahead of game time the better, as it will let you better enjoy the moment and have more time to talk. Talking of talking:
Working The Crowd
Coming from both games hosting and puzzle designing perspectives, I’ve always enjoyed chatting to players after a game as much as [and sometimes even more than] the game itself. If you’ve hosted me as a player, I’m the one who will hang around afterwards as long as possible to ask questions about the room and its contents while the rest of my team are already off down the road for dinner.
Short of hiring out a lecture theatre, I couldn’t have my usual amount of discourse with every single party guest. But maybe in some cases this was a good thing seeing their apparent frustration with the puzzles (sorry Mum!).
Party On, Wayne!
What I do hope my own party leads to, is for the roughly 50% of my guests who hadn’t done any type of escape room before, to now become enthusiasts. Best thing I can do now is bend future conversations back to escaping, make recommendations on some ‘achievable’ rooms or ones that are themed to the interests of the friends, or, shockingly, invite them to another escape room (instead of my usual team? Sacrilege!).
Happy puzzling!
Text Notations
Hello code enthusiasts, this edition will have you reading about reading!
Noting what you are here for, it is time to take notes on notations!
A previous edition looked at the Bacon Code which also had letters of text being marked, but today’s topic has the additions spread out instead of grouped in close together. So start scanning!
We are going to look at a few ways an Escape Room can mark a body of text to send a simple message. All of these have in common the following:
-the message is read in the same direction as the text (no jumbling about) (unless they are REALLY tricky, and have also directed you to read in a different direction);
-a consistent type of notation per message;
-a potentially confusing lack of punctuation; and
-text that has nothing to do with the message being hidden.
Colour Me Impressed
The most simple one up first: text in a different colour to make it stand out.
Something More Bold
Now we can start mucking around with typography emphasis – this is the fancy way of saying something that is as easy as one two three.
What Type Of Face?
I don’t know about you (how would I?), but I was today years old when I found out that the word ‘typeface’ is the correct word for what I called a ‘font’. Arial, Calibri, and Courier New are all examples of a typeface (whereas a font is used to describe one of these AND the size used, whether it is in bold or not, etc). What a crafty puzzle designer might have snuck in to some text is swapping in a different typeface to indicate their message. I don’t mean our favourite, Wingdings, but something you really have to pay attention to find, such as serif or sans serif typefaces. The serif is the little flicks and fancy bits. Here’s an example with Comic Sans and Times New Roman with directions to find an item:
Many of these can be and have been used to format whole words, but is that too easy?
Note or Not a Note?
At a simple level, we can look for a simple dot above the sequence of letters, or even a little marker pointing to one side or the other to slow down the player reading off each letter marked. This can be drawn on, or you can even grab a pin and poke a small hole through a newspaper!
This one can work a bit better with text that is already in a book or newspaper (designers just make sure you have a spare!). Otherwise you will find yourself making a weird combination of words just to use a certain text, like this:
While today you’ve been confronted with quotes from the Alice books, it does pay off to create your own mundane text to fit in your desired message in a carefully chosen block to read in a shorter timeframe (rather than the above where we grabbed a quote and worked backwards to hide a message within it).
Reading Rooms
When should you look out for a message hidden in text like this? Whenever you notice a letter looking set out differently to the rest, through its font or an extra mark, ask why?! and then go look for more that match it in standing out. It is unlikely you will be given a direct guide to this as it is quickly understood once you have noticed it.
Happy escaping!
