Scapegoats Escape Rooms (Upper Hutt, New Zealand) Time limit: 60 minutes Player limit: 2-6 Age limit: Under 14s require adult supervision Difficulty: 8/10 Date visited: December 2025 We finished The Cartel and went straight into Unholy Cottage , Scapegoats' highest rated room on Morty. This was a spooky horror room with occult themes, but it's all driven by atmosphere, with no live actors or major jump scares. Here are my thoughts: We enjoyed this one more than The Cartel,

Scapegoats Escape Rooms (Upper Hutt, New Zealand) Time limit: 60 minutes Player limit: 2-6 Age limit: Under 14s require adult supervision Difficulty: 6/10 Date visited: December 2025 We booked a lot of escape rooms on this New Zealand trip, and the one establishment I knew the least about was Scapegoats in Upper Hutt, about a half-hour drive north of Wellington. At the time I booked, there were hardly any reviews on Morty, and I couldn't find anyone on enthusiast forums who

Confinement Escape Rooms - Taupo (Taupo, New Zealand) Time limit: 60 minutes Player limit: 2-8 Age limit: Parental discretion advised for children aged 8-13 Difficulty: Standard (4/5), Advanced (5/5) Date visited: December 2025 When planning our New Zealand escape rooms, I mainly went for enthusiast recommendations or high Morty scores. But we were going to be staying in Taupo anyway, so I thought, "Why not book a game here?" The one we settled on was The Hunting Lodge at C

The Locked Room (Taupo, New Zealand) Time limit: 60 minutes Player limit: 2-4 Difficulty: Hard Date visited: December 2025 When I first started researching New Zealand escape rooms, one game that kept popping up among enthusiast circles was 1950s Cold War Codebreaker at The Locked Room near Taupo, about an hour south of smelly Rotorua. It was not easy to find, as it was situated on a farm where our mobile internet reception (and thus Google Maps) was very patchy. And it's t

Escape Rooms New Zealand - Tauranga (Tauranga, New Zealand) Time limit: 90 minutes Player limit: 2-8 Difficulty: Hard Date visited: December 2025 After finishing at Get Out in Te Awamutu, we drove 90 minutes east to Tauranga, where we settled for the night. The next day — Z's 14th birthday — we went to the Tauranga branch of Escape Rooms New Zealand, intending to play The Orphan's Revenge: A Murder Mystery (a personal recommendation of the owner). This was also J's 100th ga

Get Out Escape Rooms (Te Awamutu, New Zealand) Time limit: 60 minutes Player limit: 2-7 Difficulty: Challenging Awards: TERPECA Nominee (2025) Date visited: December 2025 This one wasn't initially in our itinerary, but thanks to a major schedule stuff-up by yours truly that was discovered just a few days before departure, we ended up with a free afternoon and an extra escape room to play — which turned out to be Z's 100th game! Wanting to experience as much of New Zealand as

Escapist  (Hamilton, New Zealand) Time limit: 75 minutes Player limit: 2-6 Difficulty: Hard (5/5) Date visited: December 2025 We were very fortunate that the earlier session of Bloodstone Keep was not booked out on this particular morning, so we were able to go straight into it after completing El Dorado . This one had a vampire theme and was considered spooky but not frightening, with darkness and atmosphere but no real scares. Here are my thoughts: The theming was again v

Escapist (Hamilton, New Zealand) Time limit: 60 minutes Player limit: 2-7 Difficulty: Medium (3/5) Date visited: December 2025 Day 2 in New Zealand saw us start the day with a 90-minute drive south from Auckland to Hamilton, where we visited Escapist, widely touted by enthusiasts as one of the best escape room establishments in New Zealand. The first room we played was El Dorado , in which our team went on a search of our brother, who went missing 5 years ago while searching

Escapade (Auckland, New Zealand) Time limit: 60 minutes Player limit: 2-6 Difficulty: Medium Date visited: December 2025 We kicked off our New Zealand adventure in Auckland, literally just a couple of hours after disembarking our flight. Due to expected Christmas closures, I had to put together a tight schedule for the first couple of days, meaning we only had one night in Auckland. I didn't want to waste this opportunity, so I asked around for recommendations for ONE room,

New Zealand trip We're finally back from our New Zealand North Island trip that took us from Auckland all the way down to Wellington. It was a fantastic trip that saw plenty of outdoor walks, children's activities, Lord of the Rings stuff, and of course, escape rooms! In all, we ended up doing 19 escape rooms across 10 days , with the busiest day being the one when we played all 5 games at Xcape in Lower Hutt, just north of Wellington. I will be separately reviewing all 19 ga