Escapism

Escape Rooms have been popping up all over Melbourne since about April of this year. I read an article in last month's Time Out magazine reviewing 6 different Escape Rooms in the city, and promptly forwarded the article to Andy with an excited "Let's do this!!!" at the top. An escape room is basically a live, interactive puzzle, where you are locked in a room for a set amount of time, and you have to work out different codes and puzzles in order to get out of the room. 

Yesterday we went to Escapism, which is located in Strike Bowling Alley at QV in the city. There are 3 different rooms to choose from here, each with a different scenario. We went as a group of five, and chose the "Forensic" room to solve. This is the scenario given about this room:

You are part of a team of investigators on the trail of a serial killer. You are close to identifying him and he knows it. Can you catch him before he gets to you?

This room is meant to be the most challenging out of the 3, with a difficulty rating of 9/10. In fact, when we got there we were told that less than 10% of groups had been able to solve the puzzle! You have a time limit of 50 minutes, which goes by super quick. It's not a cheap activity, on weekends the room costs $150, but split between 5 people that wasn't too bad. 

I won't go into too much detail as that would ruin it for anyone else going. We were blindfolded and led into a room, the door slamming shut behind us. Taking off the blindfold, we looked around and were in a police station. There are clues and information all around the room, but in the beginning we had NO IDEA where to start. We were given a phone so we could call and ask questions if we were stuck, but they wouldn't just give us information, rather they just sort of confirmed whether or not we were on the right track. We were encouraged to call before going in actually, as this room had such a high failure rate. 

Anyway it probably took us 15-20 minutes before we cracked the first clue. But what an amazing feeling we had when we did it! I actually solved it in the end (although the whole thing was a great team effort) and jumped up and down for joy when I opened a locked drawer that gave us another clue. We got a bit of confidence from that, and worked pretty solidly for the next 45 minutes. There were actually 3 different rooms that were opened with different clues, and ultimately we had to work out who the murderer was in order to escape the room. With about 5 minutes left we were SO CLOSE, we were in the last room and on the cusp of figuring out the clue that would lead us out. Andy phoned them and asked if we could have more time... I thought they would definitely say no but there was no one booked in after us so they said we could have 10 extra minutes. Shortly after we ESCAPED THE ROOM, so I'm not sure we actually used that extra time, but it did give us some breathing space. 

Oh man, the feeling when we got out of the room! It was such a buzz. The whole thing was super fun and engaging from start to finish. It was such a great way to spend an afternoon with some friends, and when we went for dinner later on we could not stop talking about it. We were of course super proud to have actually escaped given the failure rate. I think we will definitely be doing another one of these sometime soon, and this looks like a possible activity for when my family comes to visit in December (only 6 weeks from now!) Anyway if you are in Melbourne, or here on holiday, I would highly suggest doing one of these Escape Rooms.