1950s Cold War Codebreaker

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 the only escape room they currently have, among other leisure activity offerings such as axe throwing. To be honest, I was kind of a bit shocked there would be an escape room there at all, let alone a well-received one, especially as it looked tiny from the outside. But were looks deceiving?

• No! It really was a tiny room, easily the smallest escape room we've every played. And I knew there weren't going to be any secret doors opening up to new spaces, because I could tell before going in that the room wasn't connected to anything else.

• The decor was very plain too — a table, a locker, a book shelf, and some machinery along the back wall. As a 1950s hidden spy room, the set design made sense, but it really was very unassuming and did not help raise expectations.

• But as they say, don't judge a book by its cover. This room turned out to be a real hidden gem, a delightful puzzle-solving experience that made us feel like secret agents.

• The puzzles were varied and tricky, but also aligned with the theme and storyline. There was the usual hunt and seek and assortment of locks, but also quite a few hidden surprises, and some cool, hidden tech.

• The flow was also impeccable, with a little notebook offering a form of signposting by letting us know what we hadn't done and what we still had to do.

• Even the clue system was quite immersive, requiring you to pick up a vintage phone to speak to "headquarters" on the other line. We unfortunately had to use this once when we got stuck, as we thought we could not do particular puzzle yet when we actually could, and had just executed the inputs in an incorrect style the first time we tried.

• The game did have one minor hiccup when a particular mechanism didn't activate, and our GM had to come in and manually bypass it when she couldn't get it to work either. Apparently, the original creator of this room had learned the tech from Japan and was no longer there, so they struggled to fix things when they broke down.

Escape time: 48 minutes out of 60

Theming	Atmosphere	Puzzles	Creativity	Fun
C	C+	A	B+	A-

Verdict: Tiny and unassuming, but lots of fun thanks to great puzzles and smooth game flow. A real gem for escape room enthusiasts.

OVERALL RANK:

H	E	Z	J
B+	A-	B+	B+