The Clock Is Ticking: Exitus Escape Room Challenge

Now that I think of it Jarrod, you would have been the natural choice to take along for an escape room challenge. Locked in a room, with complicated clues to nut out, deductions to make, puzzles to solve… all so that you can retrieve the key to open a door…. who else would you want in there but a QUALIFIED LOCKSMITH who could pick the lock?? (The fact that I didn’t think of this till now, a week after the challenge, tells you everything you need to know about my lateral thinking skills, or lack thereof).

Obviously I didn’t take you on the blog-scursion. I took our darling aunt Kerryn, who has been chomping at the bit to be an accomplice on a blog outing.

By way of brief background, Melbourne now has a few companies providing escape room challenges. We did ours at Exitus, located in Port Melbourne.

Paintball and escape rooms, all in one convenient location

They offer the option of five different themed games, all with a 45 min time limit for you to solve the various puzzles and escape the room. There’s a Prison Break room, but my fear of being shanked by a fellow inmate ruled that out immediately. There’s a CSI Melbourne room, but my fear of terrible script writing and hollow, one-dimensional performances ruled that out also. There’s an Apollo Mission themed room which tempted me momentarily, but if David Bowie’s Space Oddity taught me anything it’s that dying in space and floating about for all eternity makes for a melancholy tribute song. The next option was Entombed, their newest room which is Egyptian themed. If you don’t escape in time they embalm you and whack you in a sarcophagus, so that one was also a no. Via process of elimination, we opted for the Casino Heist, where you have to solve the clues to crack a safe and steal gold and diamonds. (And I’ve seen all the Ocean’s Eleven series so I felt well prepared).

We got to Exitus quite early: our first mistake as the reception area is very small and there’s not really anywhere to grab food or drink/sit and relax while you wait. But it gave us time to check out the leader board for best escape times, and the polaroids of past participants. It clicked at this point that perhaps we had chosen the most difficult room. Only one team on the actual leader board for Casino Heist. Uh-oh.

Checking our time to beat…

There’s a selection of fake moustaches/novelty hats and feather boas that you don after finishing, and a polaroid is taken with you all trussed up, holding a sign to reflect whether you passed or failed. (Because as we all know, the first thing astronauts do when they return to earth safely is whack on a silly sombrero. Ole! And successful prison escapees can always be readily identified, thanks to their signature fake moustaches and pink wigs. Why they don’t photoshop them in on Crimestoppers mugshots, I have no idea).

Exitus mug shot gallery

We were joined shortly afterwards by a large group (8 participants) who were there to do the Apollo Mission room. Naturally they all wanted to pay separately, get directions to the bathrooms, question the charges. The reception area was crammed, even more so when some of the people who’d just completed their rooms emerged. Possibly my favourite moment of the afternoon occured when one woman came through a door to be asked brightly by one of the Exitus team “how did you go? Did you make it out in time?” and the woman responded drily “Uh, yes…. I was only in the toilet.”

Anyway! 4pm ticked over and it was action time for us. We were taken into the room and had the rules explained. You have one clue up your sleeve that you can ask for at any time, but only one. You have to leave your bags in a little box and it’s absolutely forbidden to take any photos or video footage whilst you’re in there, you are monitored on video surveillance whilst you’re in there to ensure this. Did we understand? Yes. The door was shut and locked and the digital clock above the door started ticking.

My heart promptly started racing at about four times that speed. I don’t know how Jack Bauer does it having that timer on the brain CONSTANTLY. It’s exhausting. I couldn’t even talk at normal speed, it was like I’d shotgunned half a dozen Red Bulls and I was wired for deduction.

Let me state outright that I’m clearly not going to spoil the experience for anyone by revealing specifics about the problems or clues.

First impressions: aesthetics and production design wise, they could have gone to a little more trouble. MDF walls, laminated word documents stuck up on the walls… It didn’t really feel like an immersive ‘oooooh, I’ve entered an opulent casino’ experience. What do I know though, we are in the grip of a global financial crisis, maybe casinos have adjusted and are now offering fibro cladding rooms, especially for the Low Rollers?

You need to crack a four number code to open a locked box in the first room and we got off to an impressive start. Much high fiving, much declaring that we were NAILING IT, much fist pumping. We dialled in the fourth number and…. the lock did not release. Devastation. Retraced our steps, went over things again. Paced. Sweated. That had to be right. That had to be right. That had to be right. Where had we gone wrong?

The clock continued counting down, FIFTEEN MINUTES HAD ELAPSED, when did that happen? I was now talking at a speed that suggested I’d done a line of coke, a chaser to the aforementioned Red Bulls. Kerryn was revisiting each of the clues and drawing the same conclusions for each. We were only in the first room. We didn’t even know how many more there were. Would we ask for our clue? Was that too humiliating? Should we persist? When is it time to admit you need help? Was I morphing into the highly irrirating Carrie Bradshaw with my incessant questioning? I couldn’t help but wonder…

That was it. Kerryn hit the emergency clue button.

Turns out we’d fallen down a rabbit hole of wrongness on one of the clues. After some brief self flagellation (me) and ‘of course!’ forehead slapping (Kerryn), we got the correct answer, opened the lock box, retrieved our key and proceeded through the door to the next room.

Ok, so to summarise what happened in the next room I am only going to say we came away with an understanding and a genuine empathy for conspiracy theorists because it happened to us. We didn’t just fall into a single rabbit hole, we fell into the hole that connects you the entire burrow network because we got crazy. We could not emerge and find our way back to rational and ordered. Crazy, seeing patterns and codes that were NEVER THERE but we were utterly convinced that YES! We could see it all so clearly. That had to mean that and that pointed to that, how delicious the way it all fitted together… *lock fails to open* F%$&! F%$&! F%$&%$&!

Believe it or not, this went on for a further thirty minutes. Our time was up, we didn’t crack the code or get our diamonds and gold.

Now, it probably sounds bizarre for me to say this, because you’ll think “what’s FUN about tying yourselves in veritable mental knots?” but it was really, genuinely great fun. There wasn’t another group right behind us, so one of the team took us through how the clues in that second room should have unfolded. Turns out at one point I had touched upon the right answer whilst talking a million miles a minute, but then I’d blinked repeatedly and swiftly moved onto another pattern that “oh! oh! Yes, this HAD TO BE THE RIGHT ONE” and we never returned to that ahem, correct suggestion.

So our fancy dress theme was abject humiliation. But despite our failings, we had a fabulous afternoon there and I’d highly recommend it to anyone. We never did see the Apollo Mission group again though #conspiracytheory

Defeated and downcast

Throwing the question over to you as always: Jarrod, the Exitus escape room. Would you go there?