Review: The Mystery Puzzle

mystery puzzleThe Mystery Puzzle is Sydney’s latest escape room game and it’s a good one.

The basic premise is the same as the others: You are locked in a room and have an hour to solve a series of puzzles that will eventually allow you to escape the room. The Mystery Puzzle has a couple of approaches that set it apart, but fundamentally there’s only so much you can do with the format. As I write there are two escape rooms in Sydney, but another two are on their way.

So what does the The Mystery Puzzle do well? First you’re actually locked in the room, albeit with a button to be used in case of emergency, no one pops into the room to help you and they have a neat way of delivering clues that’s less intrusive than the competition. The puzzles themselves are nicely conceived and the owners make some nifty use of technology to give the puzzles an edge that might otherwise be lacking – the use of technology also adds a further geeky edge to the experience.

What didn’t they do so well? We experienced what I believe were teething problems – we also had teething problems when trying out The Escape Hunt for the first time – one of the puzzles was a bit illogical and another didn’t open smoothly, both issues led to some frustration. We also accidentally hacked their grand finale and so could have walked out of the room in the first 10 minutes through trial and error. The owners took all this on board and I wouldn’t expect to see the problems continue.

Probably the biggest thing to note about The Mystery Puzzle compared to The Escape Hunt is that’s it’s less atmospheric. The Escape Hunt has put more effort into the overall experience including the waiting area and the decorations. The Mystery Puzzle’s foyer is an office waiting room and they don’t offer refreshments and so on. The rooms themselves were also not so atmospheric, the story presented was very much a basic scaffold for the puzzles and we walked out with little idea what the story-line had been. That said we felt that the puzzles in The Mystery Puzzle were more novel and engaging and the way they dealt with providing clues was far superior.

Overall we really enjoyed The Mystery Puzzle and would happily recommend it to someone wanting to do an escape room game. If you’re looking for something more atmospheric I’d probably plump on The Escape Hunt, but if you’re more focused on the puzzle side of things go for The Mystery Puzzle.

For the details and bookings see: www.themysterypuzzle.com – at the moment the code MYSTERY30P will get you a 30% discount.

We got locked into The Mystery Puzzle as guests of the nice folk who run it.

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