Review: Escape Hunt Sydney makes for a fun and puzzling afternoon

escape huntersWe went to Escape Hunt Sydney on the weekend for my son’s 13th Birthday party and had a really good time. A bunch of kids locked in a room with one hour to solve the puzzles that lead to the key that will get them out.

That was actually our second visit to Escape Hunt Sydney; the first, only a day after it opened, was a bit of a disaster. The room we were in hadn’t been set up properly and so the puzzles made no sense. Still we’d had such a good time at the Escape Hunt in Bangkok that we were prepared to give Sydney another shot. This time we had two rooms and the competition to get out first was on.

The weeks since Escape Hunt Sydney opened have clearly been put to good use. There were more staff on hand and they were clearly less flustered. The whole thing was very smooth and friendly. The puzzles were just challenging enough and hung together well. All-in-all we had a really good time and came away feeling that it’s easy to see why Escape Hunt Sydney is climbing steadily up the Trip Advisor rankings. If we had any criticism of the attraction compared to Bangkok it would only be that there was less atmosphere in Sydney – that’s partly because of the decor and partly, perhaps, because Sydney simply lacks the exotic feel of the colonial-era Far East setting of the Bangkok Escape Hunt. The other obvious difference, which I guess is because of staff costs, was that in Bangkok you got served a cup of tea, in Sydney you get pointed at a tea-bag and a hot-water urn.

But those are quibbles. Overall Escape Hunt Sydney lived up to our expectations and was a great place for a Birthday party for a group of geeky teenagers, or a group of geeky anybody’s really. This is a great addition to the range of Sydney attractions.

Mild spoiler alert. The end of the room we did involved finding the combination to a standard briefcase with dial combinations and little buttons that you slide to click the latches open. It was then that we learnt how culturally specific things like this are. The teenagers solved all the puzzles and correctly found the combination. But none of them had ever touched a briefcase before – so they wasted a full and frustrating ten minutes futilely pushing at the buttons on the briefcase instead of sliding them to one side!

All the puzzling details can be found here.

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