Nov 20 | Escape Rooms Australia e-Magazine

We wanted to say thank you for the lovely feedback we received on our first issue of the Escape Rooms Australia e-Magazine.

We hope you enjoy our November issue just as much. It has been a pleasure getting to know some more about the owners as they provide their stories of why they got into the industry.

We are also delighted to see so many new rooms opening in Australia.

We are always open to feedback to help improve this magazine feel free to email us at:

era@eludegames.com.au

Enthusiasts and GamesMasters feel free to send us your stories, we would love to hear about them.

Owners, please keep us updated on any new rooms you have opening, we would love to promote them for you.

Please feel free to share this magazine to fellow Escape Room Enthusiasts by clicking on the share icon on the bottom tool bar.

The same button will allow you to bookmark and save to favourites.

Advertising

If you would like to advertise in the magazine email us at era@eludegames.com.au and we will send you an information pack.

We look forward to bringing you the next issue of Escape Rooms Australia, if you would like to be featured send in your submissions now.

Who are we?

Narrow Escape Rooms is owned and operated by Kit, Craig & Shelley, it’s a true family affair as Shelley & Craig are brother and sister and Kit is married to Craig.

We fell in love with escape rooms after our very first game (Scram’s wizard chambers) in June 2017. After our 2^nd escape room, we sat around for hours discussing what our escape room would look like. From this excited conversation and lots of research (into the business side and of course playing lots of escape rooms) Narrow Escape Rooms was born. We opened in Penrith in Western Sydney on the 8^th October 2018 with our first game ‘Launch’ where players attempt to Launch the missiles and save the world from an alien invasion.

Our second game ‘The Inheritance’ opened in November 2020, it requires players to find the Will to inherit their fortune and our newest addition ‘Undetected’ will open very soon.

Our games are designed and built by Craig & Kit and are a mix of high and low technology with a little bit of pop culture humour or easter eggs (not the chocolate kind) thrown in for an added touch.

Why “Narrow Escape Rooms”?

We like the play on words, how often have you narrowly escaped and felt the adrenaline rush of completing that last puzzle just in time?

Why we love the industry

We love meeting new people who enjoy escape rooms, from beginners who walk into the game excited but not quite sure and walk out with their minds blown, through to escape room enthusiasts who we can have a chat about the awesome games we have played!

We don’t feel that other Escape Rooms are our competition and are always referring our customers to other escape rooms and our customers are often telling us they heard of us from other escape rooms. We invite other owners to test our new games and provide feedback on their new games, it’s a very friendly community.

We were recently closed for three months during the COVID19 lockdown in NSW and the NSW owners got together to partition our local members to recognise Escape Rooms to allow us to reopen. Our collective efforts meant Escape Rooms were specifically mentioned in an update from the NSW Government!

Our goals for the future

After our third room is completed, our venue is complete but this doesn’t mean we will stop. Our next project will be portable games for events and corporate groups and we have many more ideas to keep you entertained in the future.

For more information, check out our website https://narrowesc.com.au/

New Games

Theme 1: Silent

Background Story： There was once a famous fortune-teller who lived in an old cabin. As long as you give him enough gold coins, he would answer all your questions. However, one day, the old cabin became deathly quiet. Now, you are in front of Mr. Silent ‘ s old cabin seeking to know your own future…

Duration：60min Capacity：2-5 Key words: Beginner friendly Difficulty：3 out of 5

Theme 2: X-case

Background Story： In an abandoned factory office, there was a mysterious murder, police searched this area and have no clue. So, they called you as a detective to help. You came to the factory, but found things are far from a simple murder case.

Duration：60min Capacity：3-6 Key words: Climbing involved Difficulty：3.5 out of 5

Theme 3: Vanishing

Background Story： Recently a young architect has been reported missing after receiving a large inheritance. His concerned friends have come to you for help. Will you be able to find out what has happened?

Duration：80min Capacity：2-8 Key words: Suspenseful Drama Difficulty：4 out of 5

BOOK NOW

New Games

MISSION: IDENTITY

relocated from Canberra

You have realised that your whole life and purpose as elite Section 9 agents has been a lie. To uncover your true identities and Section 9’s darkest secrets you have evaded all security to Section 9’s top secret underground facility. There lay the answers you seek. However.. Section 9 agents are searching for you. It is only a matter of time. This is your last chance.

Can you expose the lies and escape with your lives?

Duration: 60 minutes

Difficulty: 4/5

Recommended players: 3 to 6

SABOTAGE THE ENIGMA

by Second Telling Missions

February, 1943. One of the White Rose’s leaflets calls for Germans to sabotage the doomed war effort so that the war could be brought to a close as soon as possible.

Your team has been contacted by a resistance organisation and asked to break into a top-secret army communications centre and sabotage the Enigma key-distribution mechanism.

There is only a narrow window of opportunity to do it – one hour – but the mission could change the course of history.

Duration: 60 minutes

Difficulty: 4/5

Recommended players: 3 to 6

BOOK NOW

Congratulations to our winners.

Jason Miller & Maryanne Phillips

Check your emails on how to claim your prize.

Escape Hunt Sydney brings team building back baby!

Covid certainly put a halt to any and all team building activities across the nation. But as the months have gone on and we gear up to the Xmas season, it’s becoming more and more critical for companies and teams to reconnect and rejuvenate with their colleagues.

Many escape room operators have suffered significant downturns in revenue for much of 2020 and while it’s been encouraging to see the school holiday bringing some uplifts, the corporate event and team building business has still not recovered.

But where there’s a will there’s a way and it’s been fantastic to see many operators jump on the innovation bandwagon and come up with some exciting and creative team building concepts.

Here at Escape Hunt Sydney, we’ve been working on a range of corporate team building events using different platforms and genres to suit everyone from small groups to the largest offices.

Our current offerings include:

Remote escape rooms
Remote online escape games
Hosted play at home games

Remote escape rooms (or “zoom into the room” as they can be known) are as close as it gets to the real thing. Teams come together via video and play our actual escape rooms in Sydney from their own location. They get to direct a real-life Game Master, who acts as their avatar – their eyes, ears and limbs. The team sends the GM around the room, helps them search for hidden clues, solves puzzle and ultimately tries to escape the room before time runs out! These games are suitable for up to 6-7 players at a time and with 6 rooms on offer, teams of up to 40 can enjoy this experience.

Remote online escape games are a unique interactive online experience, born out of the Covid lockdowns we all endured. Our Game Master hosts teams using a technology and communications platform (such as What’s App) and guides the team through the story, providing them with challenges, materials and hints as you progress through the adventure. These games are easily scalable and can be run with 100’s of participants from all over the world. Some of the exciting titles we have on offer include Time’s Ticking (a classic bomb defusal), The Naughty List (a Santa themed affair) and The Heist.

The final experience we offer is hosted play at home games – this is where we take our downloadable print and play games and package them up as a team building experience. We connect with the teams via zoom, introduce the game, make sure they have all the materials and provide a helping hand if needed.

With any team building event, flawless organisation and smooth execution are paramount. With all these events, the Escape Hunt team organises all digital connections and technical elements, introduces the experience and guides the teams throughout. There’s even an optional networking and debrief available for teams who just don’t want to hit the “leave meeting” button right away!

We look forward to providing these new experiences to our valued customers and also look forward to new innovations from the escape room community – a dedicated and passionate group who are working hard to bring the most exciting experiences to market in a safe and fun way.

To find out more about our remote team events click here: https://escapehunt.com/au/sydney/packages/virtual-team-events/

Click anywhere on the map to take to you an active Map of all the Escape Rooms in Australia

Why you should try an online escape room

My name is Lee-Fay Low. I have an addiction to escape rooms.

It was challenging to fulfill this addiction during the COVID-19 lockdowns, until I discovered online rooms.

Online escape rooms have let me have fun and build memories with people I can’t be with in person. They let me experience the nervous excitement of playing under time pressure, joy of discovery, satisfaction of team-work and exhilaration of completion. Online rooms have opened international doors – there are a wide variety and number of rooms for me to play. And they save on babysitting and travel.

What is an online escape room?

There are different styles of online games:

Non-hosted online games

These are usually cheaper games that you play at your own pace and when you want through a website. Most are designed so that they can be played cooperatively from multiple computers. Elude has two point and click escape games (creepy hotel and big mansion settings) with solid puzzles. Next Level in Sydney turned their narratively strong and humorous Temporal Tangle time travel escape room into a point and click game.

Games which are less like physical escape rooms are the alternative reality lite Cyphstress (siren and beer themed, Reading, UK, 3-4 hours of game play) and the Stranger Things inspired week-long online immersive events (between 5 and 15+ hours of play) hosted by Melbourne company Ukiyo.

Avatar games

A game host straps a camera to their head of chest, and players direct them to solve a bricks and mortar escape room. My preferred games have had an online inventory system which allow players to explore the room and objects through additional photos which they are given access to as those areas objects are explored. The inventory system means that some of our team can be solving puzzles using the photos while others are directing the avatar.

My favourite avatar games have had game hosts whose characters enhanced our game experience. For instance Save King’s Landing (Game of Throne themed, Dubrovnik) from was more memorable because we were the ‘imaginary friends’ of our drunken court jester game host. Mrs Jezebel (18+ black widow themed, Los Angeles USA) more tense as we grew increasingly concerned for the safety of our straight-laced detective avatar and more scared of the sexy NPC Mrs Jezebel.

Project Avatar (assassins-creed like, Ukraine) is remarkable in the expansiveness of the space (15+ different rooms), humorous avatar interactions, cut scenes and soundtrack which integrate seamlessly so it’s like controlling a real-life character in a video game.

Hosted online games

A game hosts guides you through an online mission which involves interacting with online material, as well as with the host. These vary considerably in game-play style. YouEscape (multiple themes, Greece) has unique puzzle-heavy, story-lite games with a charming home-made feel. Agent Venture (secret agent theme, London) is audio-heavy strongly improvised and gave every team member a role and different information. The Truth About Edith (crazy cat lady themed, Oregon, USA) required us to complete a refreshing variety of online puzzles and actor interactions to solve the main mystery.

Online games aren’t a temporary substitute for brick and mortar games

When online escape rooms started becoming available in April 2020, the early games tried to replicate the experience of being in a physical escape room. Some of these games were frustrating because of bottlenecks because there is only one avatar, poor transposition of puzzles to online format (e.g. faint audio, dark lighting, nausea inducing camera work) and made me feel sad and wish I could play those games in person. As the industry has innovated, there are made-for-online-play games which lean into the cooperative and creative possibilities of the internet medium. These are fun and exciting because we get to experience things that aren’t as possible in a physical room (e.g. dangerous interactions, actor driven storytelling, players having different information and powers).

I am playing brick and mortar rooms in Sydney again, however I will continue to play online games. They let me hang out with friends outside Sydney and have experiences that are different to physical games. I predict that online rooms will evolve into their own genre of escape games that continue beyond 2020.

Tips for playing online games

Don’t expect the same experience as a physical escape room, embrace the new medium.

A strong and stable internet connection is essential.

Headphones and microphone make for a better experience, as do a laptop (rather than a phone)

Booking rooms in different time zones is a puzzle in itself – use google or https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

Get onto the videochat platform (we’ve played through zoom, hangouts, discord) early to make sure all the tech is working.

Useful blogs for online games are Escape the Review which has the most up-to-date list of English language games, and Room Escape Artist Hivemind which includes the (sometimes differing) opinions of multiple players in their reviews.

CHECK ANSWER HERE

Caesar Cipher

The Emperor’s biggest secret as the name implies, the Caesar cipher was famously used by Julius Caesar during his military campaigns. It uses letter substitution (the oldest cipher technique) by substituting one letter with another.

These ciphers almost always operated by manipulating the order of the alphabet like this:

ABCD
XYZA

The upper set of letters belong to the actual message (also known as theplain text), while at the bottom was the cipher text (the letters to be used as a substitute for the ones above).

Though not necessarily the oldest cipher in history, the Caesar cipher is certainly one of the earliest demonstrations of how secret codes became powerful military assets in their own right.

It is important to remember that back in those days, literacy was not as widespread. Not many people could even read regular messages very well, let alone those hidden by a cipher! Powerful leaders like Caesar took great advantage of this, and that is why his coded messages were incredibly secure for his time.

It wasn’t until well into the 9th century that the famous Iraqi mathematician Al-Kindi introduced a method for detecting ciphers like this. And to think, his method had to resort to pattern recognition than actually discovering the secret of the cipher itself!

The Caesar Cipher Today

One of the ways that the Caesar cipher can be challenging today is that very creative puzzle makers and escape room designers all add their own twist.

After all, a Caesar cipher is ultimately still just a coded message with letters swapped. That deceptively simple mechanism leaves plenty of room for a designer to add all sorts of additional challenges in order to break the code.

Here are just a couple of examples:

Scrambled Alphabet

This involves simply having a cipher that uses your own special arrangement of letters in the alphabet. For example, instead of starting with XYZA, the cipher could be KCDA.

The weakness of this cipher means that you just need to find it and every message written in it would be automatically unencrypted. It could be written somewhere in the room attention to detail would be the key.

Multiple Ciphers

Another simple variation is to have not just one cipher in an entire escape room challenge, but several. You could enter the first room and the original Caesar cipher would be the clue you need to progress.

However, the next room would then have adifferentletter substitution cipher. Say, it’s still based on the alphabet but the shift is now two letters in reverse rather than the traditional three shifts forward. That renders your previous clue useless and it would mean you need to find another one.

In either situation, however, things can get relatively easy once the order of letters has been determined.

That’s why if you’re in an escape room with a message that seems to be made up of scrambled letters, your first instinct is to spot a pattern and then search for the string of letters that will break the code. Caesar’s cipher may be one of the oldest around, but your technique doesn’t have to be!

Exit Board Games

Like the vast majority of people, when we were required to go into lockdown we started to look for new ways to relieve boredom that didn’t involve some form of screen time.

As an Escape Room enthusiast, seeing Elude’s Facebook post about the Escape Room board games that they had on offer, I was extremely interested.

On their website I spent over an hour reviewing the description of the different games on offer and settled on 2 of the Exit Games – “Dead Man on the Orient Express” and “The Pharaoh’s Tomb”. The games arrived quickly and my husband and I commenced playing.

Although we were accustomed to having a clock letting us know how long we had left to “escape”, we chose to play without time restraints on the basis that we had to figure out each puzzle and not use any of the clues available. Playing the games this way meant that we spent approximately 4 hours on one game, however it was well worth it. The games are cleverly thought out and contain quirky elements. The hours that we spent on both games we thoroughly enjoyed. We now have ordered 2 more and are anxiously waiting for available time in order to complete them.