Exitus Escape Room Macquarie – Moonshot Review

My usual fellow escape room buddies and I (4 adults in total) tried this room (at the invitation of Exitus Escape Room Macquarie) on their opening long weekend in February 2016.  This was our 25^th room in Sydney (and our 35^th room in Australia) so far…

Strike Bowling already runs Escapism at King Street Wharf in Sydney (and in other states of Australia as well).  They recently acquired Exitus, an independent escape room operator in Melbourne, which had mixed reviews on TripAdvisor.  The rooms at Exitus Escape Room Macquarie are a mix of rooms designed by Exitus (Moonshot and Injustice) and Escapism (Forensic).  Interestingly, Forensic at King Street Wharf is being replaced soon with Casino Royale, which is supposed to be their hardest room.

My team had already escaped from each of the 3 Escapism rooms at King Street Wharf and those rooms were reasonably good (but the service was below average), so we went into Exitus Macquarie with average/low expectations.

Normally, I set out the pros and cons of a room in my reviews.  However, I really don’t have many good things to say about this room, which was really disappointing for all in my team.

I do however have a very long list of the things that I didn’t like (or which could (and should) be improved):

1.     There was no story in this room.  The puzzles had no bearing to the storyline in any way.

2.     The puzzles themselves were not well designed.  All of the puzzles had been done before elsewhere.  They were clunky – the solutions were not perfect (often requiring additional clues in the form of blacklight text hidden in the room) to solve.  We all found the puzzles annoying.

3.     One of my bigger annoyances with this room is that there is one puzzle in particular that has a fundamental error in it.  I won’t give spoilers, but the only way to solve this particular puzzle is with a clue (because the “answer” is simply incorrect).

4.     The above-mentioned puzzle is all kinds of wrong.  It requires external knowledge to solve (many tourists probably won’t have a chance with this puzzle).  They also use a blacklight marker to provide a clue for players, but they acknowledge that this “rubs off” easily so it really isn’t of any benefit.  There are other major flaws with this puzzle but I can’t go into it any further without providing spoilers.

5.     The flow of the room is poor.  There is no wow factor puzzle or props – they are all just “meh”. 

6.     We had to rush the final puzzle because we were running out of time (in the end we only escaped with 6 seconds on the clock).  I think this last puzzle is probably the only decent puzzle in Moonshot.

7.     Another aspect that I didn’t like is the clue system.  My feedback on Strike Bowling’s Escapism rooms at King Street Wharf was that the escape rooms are an “add on” to Strike’s main business of alcohol sales (together with bowling and karaoke).  Almost every time with Escapism, we called for clues and the phone rang out, or we escaped and nobody knew we had done so (until we lined up at the bar and made our way to the front to speak with the gamemaster/bartender). 

8.     What is Strike’s solution to this?  Make the clue system almost entirely automated, requiring little to no staff member involvement.  That’s right, there are QR codes all over the room and if you get stuck, you can get a clue or an answer to any puzzle (but this costs 5 points and 10 points respectively).  It is still not clear to me what “points” are – I assume they add to your total time to escape, but I’m not sure if one point equals one minute.  I find this really lazy and it does not at all address my criticism that in order to have a great experience, you need a dedicated gamemaster for each room.  Their hint system is even worse than Escapism – instead of having a busy bartender/gamemaster, you now have no gamemaster at all.

9.     Despite the fact that we only just made it out in time, there were not nearly enough puzzles in this room.  There were 5 puzzles in total, which is about the fewest puzzles of any room I can think of (with the exception perhaps of Escapism’s The Garden).  If the puzzles were better designed (and didn’t contain errors), I think players could easily escape this room in half the allowed time.  A lack of interesting, different puzzles is yet another failing of this room.

10.  Another aspect of their automated clue system that I really dislike is that after escaping from the room, you then need to run outside and scan another QR code on the wall to “stop the clock”.  This is poorly thought through.  There is one QR exit code for all of the rooms at Exitus Macquarie.  So what happens when 2 or more rooms get out at the same time – I can see this not working well at all.

11.  Some of you also won’t like the fact that Exitus Macquarie will take your credit card on arrival.  This is to cover your drinks/food purchases but also to cover them for any damage you cause to the room.  They will also make you lock up your phones for the duration of the escape (this always annoys me given we typically have our kid with a babysitter, who can’t contact us in the case of an emergency).

12.  Consistent with Escapism, they also book you in for a certain time and then make you wait 30 minutes (or thereabouts) before going into the room.  This is a not-so-subtle attempt at getting you to buy drinks/food from the bar/waiting area. 

13.  Their prices are too steep for the quality of this room.  Their prices are a flat rate for the room, which is $100 Mon-Thurs or $150 Fri-Sun.  For a standard group of 4 people, this puts their weekend rate at about the most expensive in Sydney at $37.50 per head, and couples at an amazing $75 per head.  The room does not justify anywhere near this price tag.

14.  I have also made this comment with Escapism – I think they are cheap to only offer 50 minutes to escape.  This is again aimed at making money and not at providing a great experience for customers. 

15.  I personally do not think that Exitus Macquarie will be a successful enterprise.  They are a cheap outfit that doesn’t value immersive, customer-centred experiences, but instead have gone for cheap, poorly designed rooms as an “add on” to their main game of drinks sales, bowling and karaoke. I think their King Street Wharf partner Escapism will be more successful because they have the benefit of the tourist trade and busy Saturday nights.  Macquarie Centre, in contrast, is pretty dead of an evening.  In order for escape room outfits to survive out of the CBD and major tourist hubs, they need to rely on excellent word of mouth.  I just don’t see that happening here.

16.  And now, this brings us to by far my largest annoyance with my experience at Moonshot (and which has necessarily coloured my overall experience and my views on the rest of the room, which I accept are pretty harsh).  We had the worst gamemaster we have had in 35 rooms to date by a large margin (and this includes several rooms which had no gamemaster at all).  Any other gamemasters out there, read the below exchange of words between ourselves and the gamemaster and consider it a lesson in how not to speak to customers:

Strike employee:  “So what did you guys think of the room?”

Me:   “To be honest, I didn’t like it.  Can you explain the last puzzle to me?”

Strike employee:  “No, unfortunately because you didn’t escape I can’t tell you about it”

Me (and the rest of my team in unison):   “Um, we did escape – you just met us outside (we opened the door, not you?)”

Strike employee:  “Hold on, you all need to take a breath, it’s just a game” (she says with an unbelievably condescending smile on her face)

* My team and I then just stare at her blankly – none of us quite believing what was coming out of her mouth

And finally, in a yet another poorly-considered move, the Strike employee looks at me in particular and says “sir, you’re still not breathing” (with that condescending smile still very much present)

By this time I had steam coming out of my ears – I don’t like being spoken to like a piece of shit by anyone, let alone by a gamemaster at an escape room where my team has gone to have fun.  I had to bite my tongue so hard not to tell this gamemaster where to go.  She has no place working in customer service (or needs a heck of a lot of training before she should be put in front of customers). I mean seriously?

Thankfully, 2 other gamemasters/employees spoke with us and seemed to genuinely take our feedback on board. 

Simply put, this is a very weak room, with clunky puzzles (some of which contain manifest errors) and there is no story to be seen.

I first read the blurb on this room and thought it sounded fantastic – I was genuinely excited to see what they could do with such a cool subject matter.  I was beyond disappointed with the reality of the room.   

I cannot for the life of me understand why Strike Bowling would want to buy the rights to this room.  Their own rooms at Escapism are far superior in quality, theme and puzzles. 

As always, the major determining factor in how I judge rooms is the fun factor.  We simply didn’t have fun.  And if we had have had some fun, the gamemaster stripped that away in mere seconds.

Where:                        Macquarie Centre (Herring Road and Waterloo Road, North Ryde)

Duration:                    50 minutes

Themes:                      3 themes 

Cost:                           $100 (flat room rate Mon-Thurs and $150 Fri-Sun)

Overall Summary:     Hugely disappointing with a rude gamemaster

More details:               http://strikeescaperooms.com.au/escape-room-macquarie/

Sydney's latest escape room - Exitus Macquarie Centre (Strike Bowling)

Hi everyone

We have a new escape room outfit in town.  A little over 12 months ago, Strike Bowling opened up Escapism at King Street Wharf. 

Since that time, Strike Bowling has bought out Exitus Escape Rooms, which were based in Melbourne.  Based solely on TripAdvisor reviews, it seems that Exitus had a lot of mixed reviews, due largely to poor service.

Hopefully this will improve with Strike Bowling taking over the wheel.  The new venue, called Exitus Macquarie, will open on February 29 at Strike Bowling at Macquarie Centre.

There will be 3 rooms at Exitus Macquarie:

·        Forensic (which is already available in Sydney at King Street Wharf)

·        Jailbreak

·        Moonshot

You can read my review of Forensic here – it was definitely one of the hardest rooms my group has tried.

The summaries of Jailbreak and Moonshot are below:

I really like the sound of Moonshot (which sounds like what used be called "Apollo Mission" at Exitus in Melbourne).  

I’m really looking forward to checking out Sydney’s latest rooms.

Thanks

Scott

Escape Room in a Box - The Werewolf Experiment on Kickstarter

Hi all

I stumbled across a new Kickstarter campaign today.  It's an escape room in a box.  The idea is that you purchase the box and then host your own escape room at home!  

They have managed to fit 19 puzzles into this small box, which equates to one hour of fun at home.  

The theme is a werewolf experiment, where upon opening the box you release a toxin which will turn you all into werewolves unless, you guessed it, you manage to unlock the antidote!

It's similar to Breakout EDU in that there is an escape room in a box that you can play anywhere.  The difference with this one is that the game and puzzles have been designed by escape room experts.  The reviews all sound good (see the bottom of the Kickstarter campaign page).

The price equates to about $100AUD, including shipping.  The game can be replayed over and over (by different teams), so if you purchase the game with a group, you can get it at a very reasonable price.

If the Kickstarter is successful, there is a good chance that they will release further themes in the future.

Unfortunately, they are estimating that it will take 12 months to ship out the escape rooms in a box.  This is a long time to have to wait, but in my experience with Kickstarter, it's probably about average.


You can check out the Kickstarter campaign here.

Thanks

Scott

My very own escape room at home using a Breakout EDU box

Hi everyone

I am finally getting around to posting about my own Breakout EDU escape room that I designed for my escape room group (my wife and 2 friends) as my Christmas present to them.  See my earlier blog here summarising what Breakout EDU is.

Over all I think they had fun, but it was a bit of a shemozzle (due largely to factors outside of my control)…

Location

Initially, I had planned to set up the escape room at my friends’ vacant house – they are about to embark on a house demolition and rebuild so the space would have been perfect.  However, about a week before our escape was due to take place, their house started to get demolished.  So, my plan B was to use my new house, which is currently being built.  The house is currently at the stage of being gyprocked, but there are exposed concrete floors and dust everywhere – your typical work site.

Design

The first thing I had to come up with was the theme.  The idea that I came up with for the theme is that my 3 year old daughter was CRANKY with the 4 of us because we always leave her out of our escape room and board gaming fun.  So, she kidnapped me and took me to her “lair” – the task for my friends and wife being to locate the lair and then retrieve me.

This theme was useful because it allowed me to use her random toys and other building materials as props.  The idea was that I had been captured, but in a last ditch effort to be freed, I managed to leave “breadcrumb” puzzles for my team to solve in order to find me.

I spent probably 30+ hours in designing the puzzles.  We had a lot of puzzles and the real fun in designing your own escape room is that you can design puzzles that are specific to your group.  For example, many of my puzzles were based on board games that we all play together or on our experiences at the various escape rooms we have played together.

By far the most challenging aspect is to get the flow right and to consider the order in which puzzles will be opened.  See attached my mind map which gives you an idea of the kind of detail required to link each puzzle element and across the various different puzzles.  It’s in short hand so it probably won’t mean much to you, but it gives you an idea of the thinking that I went through in designing the escape:

The big day

I got to our site early.  It is a locked work site, but of course I have learned the useful skill of using a credit card to get in the front door (which is the same way my team would need to get into the house).

It took me a couple of hours to set up.  I also had to set up a blanket, iPad and snacks for my 3 year old captor who would hopefully sit quietly in a spare room while the escape unfolded.

I set up my video camera in the hallway so that I could record what was going on.  It was really interesting to see my team solve my puzzles. They solved them in quite a different order to the order I had expected.  

Their weakness (which is my team’s weakness is every escape room we have been to) is in the hunt and seek aspect – we always miss stuff that is right in front of our noses. I had hidden a number of puzzles and even an entire remote control car ramp/maze on the outside of the building, but they never thought to open the door or look out the window.  They breezed through most of the tricky puzzles, as they usually do.   

I included a couple of tech elements (or the closest thing I could get to tech elements in a backyard operation, having regarding to the fact that there is no electricity at my work site!).  I used QR codes that had videos of my 3 year old captor explaining her reasons for kidnapping me, I took a Street View 360 degree photo of one of the rooms in the escape with clues on the walls, which they had to use Google Cardboard to view and solve. 

I also hand-made a couple of puzzles, like a remote control car that was on the outside of the building (which they had to use communication to first free the car and then drive the car down a maze to release a key).  To solve this puzzle, they needed to use a keychain that they obtained at the very start of the escape (it’s one of those retractable key chains that holds work access cards (or in their case, a credit card to jimmy the door), which they needed to hang out the window to reach the car). 

I also had an idea of giving them snacks when they opened the main box (but before the end of the game).  Of course nothing should be as it seems, so I had put a false bottom on a can of Pringles (I had used a round lid of a tin of beans, which fit inside the Pringles container perfectly).  The tin was made of metal and beneath it was a key.  They needed to find a magnet on an extendable stick that I had hidden, empty out the Pringles container and then get the key.  They solved this one in about 2 minutes, which was impressive. 

See below some photos from the day.

My home made Breakout EDU box:

My friends and wife working away at some of the puzzles:

My daughter pretending to be "cranky" and wearing a disguise in her (subtitled) video:

Shemozzle

The shemozzle part occurred at about the half way point.  They were almost one hour in and suddenly, a team of 3 painters walked into the house ready to paint all of the walls and ceilings.  I had bet that none of the tradies working on our house would be working on 30 December, but I was wrong!

So we needed to clear out of there fast, which was REALLY disappointing.  We then went and had lunch and given that the painters had not left by the time we came back from lunch, I decided to set up the room again at my house.  I then spent an hour completely clearing out my back room (throwing everything in the backyard) and then setting up everything again (including the remote control car maze outside). 

What I learned

Over all I think my team had fun.  It took them something like 2 hours 30 minutes to solve everything (with a couple of hints along the way, most of which were aimed at helping them hunt and seek better).   Thankfully, all of my puzzles worked and didn’t have any errors (except for a pesky test tube I had stuck to the ceiling that just wouldn’t fall when hit multiple times by a nerf gun…).

I learned from this experience that:

• designing an escape room is a lot of hard work (and comes with a lot of self-imposed pressure to get everything right);
• bespoke puzzles designed specifically for you are awesome;
• trying to get a 3 year old to say her lines on video is HARD work (and editing said video also takes forever);
• you can’t predict how teams are going to approach a room or the order in which they will decide to do puzzles;
• it’s really FRUSTRATING watching a team trying to figure out your puzzles, knowing they are close but not quite on the right track (I had to bite my tongue so many times);
• all escape rooms need to be beta tested by at least 30 teams in order to iron out issues (including issues which simply cannot be anticipated on day one); and
• you don’t necessarily need high tech puzzles to have fun in an escape room.

I really enjoyed the whole process of making my little escape room in a box.  I probably won’t do it again for at least a few months (mainly because I’m about to move into our new house and the time commitment to design one of these rooms with the amount of puzzles I want to include is enormous). 

Luckily, one of my team members is designing the next escape room in a box, so I can’t wait to check it out.

Final words

The last puzzle I gave my friends was on a video via a QR code.  The gist of it was that given that my friends have had the benefit of my blog over the past 35 rooms (and me organising every one of those rooms for them), then surely they are big fans of my blog and would know the URL off the top of their head.

So, the final puzzle was to send me a text message with the URL of my blog.

They had 3 minutes to come up with the answer.  They failed…

*                               *                               *              

       

If anyone else has a go at designing their own escape room, I’d love to hear how you go.  There are a heap of ready-designed escape rooms on the Breakout EDU (and I understand hundreds more will soon be uploaded), so you can get your own box and start playing rooms straight away without any of the hard work involved in designing your own.

Enjoy!

Scott

Canberra gets its first Escape Room - Riddle Room

Just before Christmas, I got an email from Chris and Jesse, the owners of Riddle Room in Canberra, letting me know about the opening of Riddle Room.

Riddle Room is the first escape room outfit to hit the Canberra market. They have just the one room so far, but have plans to open other rooms if things go well.  See below summary of their first room:

The Nightmare Room

You are contacted by the DreamWake Corp. an experimental science facility that specialise in Oneirology, the study of dreams. They have developed a new technology which can transfer a conscious mind into another's subconscious. They need your help with a particular case; a patient is trapped inside a recurring nightmare. 

The DreamWake Corp. believe that if you are able to go deep into her subconscious and find out what is causing the nightmare she’ll be able to wake up. This procedure has never been fully tested and once inside you'll only have 60 minutes before you lose your connection and become trapped inside her nightmare forever. 

Anything could happen in the Nightmare Room. 

Riddle Room is now open and ready for business.  I now finally have a reason to go and check out our nation's capital (because let's face it, what else is there to do in Canberra?!?)

;-)

Check out their website here.

Sydney's newest escape room outfit - Outlast Escape Rooms in Ashfield

Hi everyone

After doing a simple Google search on escape rooms in Sydney, I stumbled across a new room that appears to have opened recently. 

They are called Outlast Real Life Room Escape.  They are based in Ashfield in the inner west.

They have 3 rooms - Silent Hospital, The Tomb of Babel and Room 7 (although note that The Tomb of Babel apparently requires at least one team member to know how to read Chinese characters(?!?)...

No idea if they are any good or just another Room Escape/Escape Club at Kingsford. Their website doesn't read the best and I wrote an email some time ago to the owners asking them for some further information about their rooms - I still haven't had a response, which is not a good sign.

You can find their website here.

If anyone has tried out any of their rooms, please post a comment and let me know what you thought.

Thanks
Scott

Break the Code Plus - Da Vinci review

This time some of my friends from my work went to Break The Code Plus to try their final room (and to use up my final Scoopon voucher).  We were a team of 4 adults – 3 relatively experienced players and one new player.  We went there in December 2015.  This was my 24th room in Sydney (and 34th room in Australia), so far...

I have had really inconsistent experiences at Break the Code Plus in the past – their Lost room was great, but their other rooms were poorly designed, lacked creative puzzles, were plagued with technical issues, etc.

After having done their Lost room most recently, I was really hopeful that Da Vinci would be a decent room. 

As for what I liked most about the Da Vinci room at Break the Code Plus:

• the theming was pretty strong.  For the most part, the puzzles and props all suited the room (see below for the exception);
• there was a pretty good variety of puzzles – one puzzle in particular worked flawlessly and used technology I had never seen before, which was pretty cool;
• they have listened to earlier feedback and now use walkie talkies to communicate with players (rather than ruining the immersion by walking into the room to provide clues/guidance);
• there was lots to do for a group of 4 people, which was good; and
• for the most part, it was clear from the puzzles as to what we needed to do (although not always).

Now, for what I didn’t like so much:

• ·    a couple of the puzzles were a little clunky (but not as clunky as their other rooms, like Avatar for example, which is easily their worst room) – I think the instructions could be tweaked to improve this quite easily;
• we had a technical issue while we were there.  Without giving any spoilers, there is something out of reach which is supposed to come into reach upon solving a puzzle.  The puzzle didn’t work, but we were able to reach the certain something and we then progressed through the game (without having solved the non-working puzzle).  This needs to be fixed;
• their standard pricing is simply too expensive for the quality of this room.  There are much better escape room outfits in Sydney that are far cheaper;
• there is one relatively cool puzzle (again, no spoilers) but it was poorly designed – we have seen similar technology at Enigma Room which was much better designed and worked flawlessly (and very logically) – the solution to the puzzle in Da Vinci was similar but pretty illogical and poorly designed; and
• my biggest gripe with this room by far was one particular puzzle, which is the seoncd last puzzle for the room.  We managed to get to this puzzle in about 35 minutes, so we were tracking pretty well.  However, this puzzle was simply too difficult for non-musically trained people.

READ ON IF YOU WANT TO READ SPOILERS – YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!

It’s really hard to explain my gripes with this puzzle without going into a little more detail.  The puzzle is a laser puzzle, with each laser being a different musical note when the laser beam is disturbed.  I think there were 8 or so lasers (ie notes) in total.  In order to solve this puzzle, you had to replicate a song with the notes.  The song contained 23 notes (no, that’s not a typo). 

I recall when speaking with one of the designers at ERM in Melbourne about their original room (and the first escape room in Melbourne and Australia for that matter), they said the one puzzle that stumped most teams in their room was a musical puzzle.  That puzzle required you to replicate a 4 note pattern using 3 notes.  We got it on the first go, but the owner told me that so many people are tone deaf that it was a real problem. 

Compare that to a 23 note melody in Da Vinci.  I have some musical training (albeit a long time ago) and so did one other member of our team, but we tried for some 30 minutes on this puzzle without any luck.  We all found this puzzle incredibly frustrating –it honestly zapped all of the fun we had had up to that moment in Da Vinci.  The melody we were given to copy was really fast – you couldn’t slow it down and it seemed (at least to me) to be in a different key to the notes on the lasers – even when I heard the correct pattern, it just sounded off to me.

This laser puzzle also did not suit the theme of Da Vinci at all.  It really let down the rest of the theming, which was pretty good.  Break the Code Plus seem to throw in high tech for the sake of high tech – I would prefer a well themed, low tech room to a high tech room that doesn’t match the theme. 

A further problem with difficult musical puzzles is that there is no way to give a clue.  And indeed when we were finally given a “clue” it was effectively the answer written on pieces of laminated paper which the game master slid under the door.

This is a really poorly-designed puzzle - it requires too much musical knowledge/skill and it completely ruins the theming of this room.  When I told the game master that I thought this puzzle was simply too difficult for non-musically trained players, he said that they find that normally there is at least one musically-trained person in each team.  Needless to say I did not find this response useful or satisfactory!

I found this room to be incredibly (and entirely unnecessarily) frustrating. The first 75% was great – the last 25% was shite.

Where:                        Level 1, 741 George Street, Haymarket, NSW

Duration:                    60 minutes

Themes:                     6 themes (which will apparently change often)

Cost:                           $180 (for a team of 4) (although we had a Groupon for $80)

Overall Summary:     Requires skills not held by the average person in order to escape – avoid this room.    

More details:             http://www.breakthecode.com.au/