[187] Riddle Room: The Hideaway

Date: 08/06/2024

Company Name: Riddle Room

Room: The Hideaway

Cost: $45 per person - Riddle Room were kind enough to offer us $10 off per person (Team of 4)

Time Allowed: 60 Minutes

Website Link: https://riddleroom.com.au/canberra/#rooms

Location: 8/160 Lysaght St, Mitchell ACT 2911

Best Parking: Street parking right outside the establishment or there is a complex out the back which has ample parking available

Succeeded: No, running about 4-6 minutes over time

Rating: 

• Hospitality/Gamesmaster: 9
• Room Quality: 8
• Immersion: 7
• Puzzle Design: 7 
• Fun Factor: 6

Overall: 7.40/10

Room Description: 

While investigating an elusive criminal, a police detective has gone missing without a trace. We need your help to find her before it's too late.

Comments:

After completing The Dungeon, we had a couple hours to kill. The staff were friendly enough to give us some recommendations and as such, off to Villain Burger we went. With our bellies full and the accommodation a stones throw away from Riddle Room, we went back for a little kip and came back refreshed for our final two rooms for the Saturday.

The first one being The Hideaway, which was our third room at Riddle Room and my 38th room completed overall. Spending the entire day tackling four out of five of Riddle Room's escapes, we consistently encountered the same friendly and exceptional staff. They were very welcoming, highly attentive, and spot-on as our Gamesmasters. Riddle Room uses a unique method of communication for Gamesmastering, utilizing a version of the "Voice of God" system. Responses to our questions are displayed on a monitor that also keeps track of our time. I quite liked this approach as it minimized miscommunication. However, the only drawback is that in a multi-room escape, you have to make your way back to the first room to see the monitor.

The Hideaway is a reasonably sized escape room with lots of puzzles to solve, offering varying levels of difficulty. *Fun Fact*: We were told that it has the same number of puzzles to complete as The Dungeon. Unfortunately for us, we weren't met with the same outcome, as we failed to escape within the allotted 60 minutes, taking about 65 minutes to escape from memory.

Hideaway is really well-themed. It's clear that a lot of hard work has gone into the presentation of the room and the props. There is also a strong storyline that continues throughout the experience. Unlike some other rooms, there are no dark areas or scary elements in Hideaway at all, making it a more accessible and less intimidating experience. My team found Hideaway to be probably the most challenging of all the rooms we played at Riddle Room. This was due to our inability to see what was right in front of us and partly because some of the puzzles were quite challenging.