Escape Rooms

Escape Rooms have become increasingly popular in the last few years and I am definitely on board with it. I did my first escape room a few years ago and I have done a number of rooms since then, but the first one I did is probably one of my favourites. It involved a human sized hamster wheel and a floor that moved by pulling on ropes to reveal the door to another room.

I love the idea of working with a group to solve puzzles and it is really interesting to see how people think differently – where I might struggle to solve a puzzle, someone else might find it quite easy and vice versa. So when you have a group with lots of people that think differently you generally can solve puzzles more quickly.

Naturally when you have people that think differently and go about solving puzzles in different ways there can be some disagreements – this has definitely been the case for me. The experience can be very different depending on who you are doing the room with as well as how many people you have. I have done rooms with any number between 3-6 people, but I have found 4 people to be the best number because it is less cramped, but you still have the benefit of different people with unique approaches to the puzzles.   

During the Sydney lockdown, as if we weren’t sick of being stuck inside already, a friend and I decided to explore the idea of virtual escape rooms. We have a group that we have done escape rooms with in the past so we floated the idea to them, to see if they would be interested. They were keen so we set a time and sat down to play. There are a surprising number of options for virtual escape rooms – I’m guessing with covid, this has become increasingly popular with a higher demand in the last few years. We picked a room that looked interesting and started off. I wasn’t sure how the experience would be and although it wasn’t quite the same as being there in person, it was still really fun.

There were multiple rooms involved, and it was fun to piece together the story as we went along, with interactive elements at the end, where we got to choose the ending of the story. I am very much looking forward to doing escape rooms in person again soon, but the virtual escape room was definitely a nice way to connect with people in the meantime.