TED-Ed + PostCurious Age: Recommended 14+ Players: 1-4 Play Time: 720 minutes Awards: 2025 Golden Lock Award We love jigsaw puzzles — we have a few 1000+ piece puzzles hanging all around the house — and we also really enjoy table-top escape games, so when I saw Pandora's Legacy on Kickstarter over a year ago, I immediately jumped on the bandwagon. I received the game before the end of 2025 and played it with the kids as a team of 3 during the school holidays. Did it live up t

Stupid Particle - Taipei Baoqing Branch (Taipei, Taiwan) Time limit: 60 minutes Age limit: Under 12 requires adult Player limit: 5-6 Difficulty: Hard Date visited: April 2026 Our final game on this Taiwan trip was the famous Bubble Tea [竹本家] room at Stupid Particle! I had heard good things about this quintessential Taiwanese escape room, but was somewhat concerned because it's apparently very difficult for foreign players due to having a significant amount of reading. With 5

Funlock Studio - Taipei (Taipei, Taiwan) Time limit: 70 minutes Age limit: 12+ (probably due to fragile props) Player limit: 3-6 Difficulty: Medium Date visited: April 2026 With E working again, I took my mother and the boys to another Funlock room. We previously played Song of Inari and Arabian Nights, their two "English-friendly" rooms, both of which were small but solid (and badly translated). This time, we went straight for their biggest, newest room, Lost Way Ticket, a H

Kuaitaoa Workshop - Taipei Qingguang Store [塊陶阿工作室 - 台北晴光店] (Taipei, Taiwan) Time limit: 90 minutes Age limit: Under 12 requires adult Player limit: 4-8 Difficulty: 4/5 Fear Factor: 4/5 Date visited: April 2026 Immediately after the incredible Cursed Rain, we headed to Kuaitaoa (塊陶阿) — a Mandarin homophone for “Get out of here!" — to play the horror game 醫怨, which I have roughly translated to Grudge Hospital. [醫怨 in Mandarin is pronounced "Yi Yuan", which sounds the same as

Dream Kingdom - Flagship Store [夢遊王國旗艦館] (Taipei, Taiwan) Time limit: 80 minutes Age limit: 18+ (under 18 allowed if you contact them first and sign waiver) Player limit: 3-6 (minimum 4 players on weekends) Difficulty: Medium Awards: Golden Escape Award (Taiwan) - Game of the Year (2nd place), Best Set Design Game, Best Mechanism Game, Best Narrative Game, Best Puzzle Game Date visited: April 2026 Of all the games I booked on this Taiwan trip, none was more highly anticipate

Rostart Games - Xinyi Flagship Store (Taipei, Taiwan) Time limit: 80 minutes (for some reason our game time was 65 minutes) Age limit: Under 12 requires adult Player limit: Minimum 4 on weekdays, 6 on weekends Difficulty: Hard Date visited: April 2026 Misty Island [迷霧島] was an interesting multi-route game that's a little difficult to explain, but I'll try. It's actually 3 separate escape rooms with a shared common area in the middle. So if you want to play all 3 "routes", you

Rostart Games - Xinyi Flagship Store (Taipei, Taiwan) Time limit: 60 minutes Age limit: 12+ recommended Player limit: 3-7 (2 players allowed on weekdays) Difficulty: Medium Date visited: April 2026 We had a good time playing Rostart's Red Sun the last time we were in Taiwan, so this time we decided to check out some more. Unfortunately, many of their games are horror and strictly 18+, so we had to go with some of the more family friendly options. Pirate Jack, at Rostart's fla

The King Pork [頂級豬排遊戲工作室] (Taipei, Taiwan) Time limit: 70 minutes Age limit: 12+ recommended Player limit: 2-6 Difficulty: Medium Awards: Golden Escape Award (Taiwan) - Best Narrative Puzzle Game (2022) Date visited: April 2026 Taiwan has its own Golden Escape Awards, which I used to guide me on which rooms to book on this particular trip. One of the award winners that kept popping up was 鱗屋之中 (roughly translated to In the House of Scales), which won the 2022 award for Best N

Stupid Particle - Anhe Original Branch (Taipei, Taiwan) Time limit: 60 minutes Age limit: 12+ (ages 12-15 require an adult) Player limit: 5-6 Difficulty: Hard Date visited: April 2026 We're back in Taiwan! The last time we were in Taipei, we booked exclusively rooms that could be played in English except for one — 顛倒の室 (The Upside-Down Room) at Stupid Particle. The English-playable rooms were a mixed bag, partly because of poor translations, so Stupid Particle actually turned

Escape This (Sydney, Australia) Time limit: 60 minutes Age limit: 18+ Player limit: 2-4 Difficulty: 8/10 Date visited: February 2026 My buddy V, with whom I played a bunch of rooms with in Geelong and Melbourne last year (including the transcendent Carnivorous ), was in Sydney for a brief work/family visit in February. With only a couple of hours to spare in our busy schedules, we of course had to play an escape room! Coming off the surprisingly solid Frankenstein Resurrecti

Labyrinth Escape Rooms (Parramatta, Australia) Time limit: 60 Age limit: None Player limit: 2-8 (recommend 4+) Difficulty: Hard Date visited: January 2026 Outbreak was our third and final room at Labyrinth, and also reportedly their hardest, with an escape rate of about 10% (according to our GM)! How did we go? This was easily my favourite of the three rooms we did at Labyrinth, though it was not without flaws. But as an escape room experience, it felt like a step up compar

Labyrinth Escape Rooms (Parramatta, Australia) Time limit: 60 Age limit: None Player limit: 2-6 Difficulty: Medium to Hard Date visited: January 2026 Note: There are some discrepancies about whether this room is called Game Night or Games Night , as it appears as both on the Labyrinth website as well as other third-party sources. To me, Game Night sounds better, so that's what I've gone with, Our second room at Labyrinth was Game Night , which we tackled after returning from

Labyrinth Escape Rooms (Parramatta, Australia) Time limit: 60 Age limit: None Player limit: 2-8 (recommend 4) Difficulty: Medium to Hard Awards: TERPECA Nominee (2022) Date visited: January 2026 Our final escape room adventure before the start of the 2026 school year took us back to Parramatta, this time to Labyrinth Escape, a small business that opened back in 2015. We decided to take advantage of a Sunday special they had at the time, where children under 18 received a 50%

PaniQ Room (Sydney, Australia) Time limit: 60 minutes Age limit: 2 players must be 16+ (flexible) Player limit: 3-9 Difficulty: 4/5 Date visited: January 2026 After completing Run (Supercell 117) , we had a brief break before heading back to PaniQ Room to play our second room of the day, Time Hotel (Lift) . I thought it had an interesting premise: Your grandfather owned a 1940s hotel that burned down with hidden gold inside, and now you have a chance to travel back in time t

PaniQ Room (Sydney, Australia) Time limit: 60 minutes Age limit: None Player limit: 2-8 Difficulty: 4/5 Date visited: January 2026 We had a few days left in the school holidays, so I decided to take the boys and their cousin C to PaniQ Room at The Rocks in Sydney. One of the rooms we wanted to do was their old classic, Supercell 117 , a traditional prison escape game. However, they happened to have a special, limited-time collaboration with the streaming platform Binge at th

Narrow Escape Rooms (Penrith, Australia) Time limit: 60-70 minutes Age limit: None Player limit: 2-8 Difficulty: Medium (50% success rate) Date visited: January 2026 The Hidden Temple was the main reason we made the drive back to Penrith. Given that it's Narrow Escape's newest and most ambitious room, we had pretty high expectations, especially after seeing some glowing reviews from play testers (mostly other Sydney escape room owners). Did it live up to the hype? Absolutel

Narrow Escape Rooms (Penrith, Australia) Time limit: 60 minutes Age limit: None Player limit: 2-6 Difficulty: Medium (60% success rate) Date visited: January 2026 The first time we made the drive to Penrith to play Narrow Escape was in January 2025. On that trip, we had a great time in Undetected and especially The Inheritance, and vowed to return to play Launch (their other available game at the time) once their new room (which would turn out to be The Hidden Temple ) was

Scram Escape Rooms - Church St, Parramatta (Sydney, Australia) Time limit: 70 minutes Age limit: 15+ recommended Player limit: 2-8 (4-8 recommended) Difficulty: 46% escape rate Date visited: January 2026 This was the third and final room of our father-and-sons adventure at Scram Parramatta. Of course, we saved the best for last. F.E.A.R. (an acronym for "Forget Everything And Run") is said to be one of Australia's scariest escape rooms, and I was initially trepidatious play

Scram Escape Rooms - Church St, Parramatta (Sydney, Australia) Time limit: 60 minutes Age limit: None Player limit: 2-8 Difficulty: 44% escape rate Date visited: January 2026 This was our second of three rooms during our father-and-sons adventure to Scram Parramatta. Despite the name, this was not a horror room and was more of a wizardry magic room. We had previously played The Wizard Chambers at Scram's O'Connell Street venue, which was pretty average, so I was keen to see

Scram Escape Rooms - Church St, Parramatta (Sydney, Australia) Time limit: 60 minutes Age limit: None Player limit: 2-8 Difficulty: 49% escape rate Awards: TERPECA Nominee (2022) Date visited: January 2026 It was still the school holidays, so we decided to finally head to Scram in Parramatta to tackle a few of their rooms. Hard to believe, but it took me over 125 rooms before I finally played an Alice in Wonderland theme. Here are my thoughts: This is one of Scram's older lo