Revelation Puzzle Rooms - Doomsday Review (Canberra)

Hi everyone

The second room that we hit at Revelation Puzzle Rooms (in March 2021) was Doomsday, the room summary of which is below:

 

You are a group of operatives working for a super secret organisation. Extremely high levels of Valerium have been detected inside Genesis Laboratories and you have been sent to investigate. You infiltrated the Lab as Chemists, Biohazard Officers and the like.

After a few days, you manage to track down the source to Lab 3, and you are now breaking back in, in the middle of the night, to find the exact source and put a stop to it. You can’t be sure of the exact cause, but whatever it is, it can’t be anything good. Can you make the right choice before the time runs out?

Doomsday was our second room in Canberra and our 169^th room to date. 

Here is what I thought:

• Doomsday is “break in, find something and get out” room, but it has a really unique element that I haven’t seen (or even heard of) before.  Doomsday is played in the same physical space as Revelation’s Toxic room.  From a design perspective, Revelation designed effectively 2 rooms’ worth of puzzles in the same space, with half being playable in the Toxic version and the other half in the Doomsday version;

• we played both rooms within about 15 minutes of each other, so we were very aware of each of the puzzles in the space that we had just solved.  I suspect most teams who play both rooms might not be playing them back to back like we did, but it really doesn’t matter either way – the puzzles in each room are quite different;

•  I was really impressed with the execution of this and I am genuinely surprised that other escape room businesses have not tried this idea, particularly in some locations (like Sydney or Melb CBDs) where rents are incredibly high and space is at an absolute premium;

•  I was also impressed that the storyline in Toxic and Doomsday is seamless and continues across both rooms.  It also makes sense why players are back in the space (and the puzzles all make sense in the space too, which is great);

• again, as with Toxic, there is a little bit of hunt and seek fun, together with a really nice mix of puzzles;

•  my team found this room a little harder than Toxic.  We got stuck on a couple of puzzle elements (the usual thing of not seeing what is right in front of us).  We escaped in 32 minutes and 24 seconds, which was still a 4 player record for the room, so that was nice;

• the level of theming in Doomsday was, you guessed it, the same level as in Toxic :-); and

• again, as with Toxic, this room is not scary and would suit families (although there is a reasonably noisy alarm that goes off during the experience, so bear that in mind for any younger kids who don’t like loud noises).  But the experience is not scary and the level of difficulty would definitely suit families as well.

As with Toxic, my team really enjoyed Doomsday.  The continuation of the overall story was nice, there was a nice mix of new puzzles, and it was really cool to see how the same space can be used for quite different puzzles. 

For breaking the 4 player record, we walked away with a cool room pin and record breaker pin, which was really nice.  In each of their rooms, Revelation shows each of the puzzles on a screen and how fast your team managed to solve each puzzle (together with how fast you were relative to other players).  That was something that we have seen used in Sydney and elsewhere in Canberra. 

Where:                         8/151-155 Gladstone Street, Fyshwick

Duration:                      60 minutes

Themes:                      3 themes (with another one planned for release later in 2021)

Cost:                            Price:                          $40pp (depending on team size)

                                   Overall Thoughts:          A fun room that uniquely uses the same space as another room

More details:                http://revelationpuzzlerooms.com