Social Escape Rooms (Sydney, Australia)
Time limit: 60 minutes
Age limit: None
Player limit: 2-8
Difficulty: Medium
Date visited: January 2025
The last few times we went to Social Escape, we were told that they were in the process of completely redoing their Baker Street Mystery room. Owner Mark admitted that, as it is one of their first and older games, he had bought the puzzles for the room (all their other rooms contain bespoke puzzles), so he wanted to make a new version of the room that was completely his own. Moreover, Baker Street Mystery was their only single-room escape game (all their other games featured multiple sections/areas), so he also wanted to expand the room to add more spaces.
Some might think it would be wise to wait until the room has been upgraded to play it, but not us! Our thinking was that we had to quickly play “version 1” of their Baker Street room before it was no longer available.
On this day, we went as a group of 3 (E had to work). I must admit, for the aforementioned reasons, I did not have high expectations for the room. And once again, I proved myself wrong! Baker Street Mystery was a fantastic room — great Sherlock theming, fantastically challenging puzzles, superb game flow, and simply a lot of fun.
There is something about the Sherlock Holmes theme that goes really well with escape rooms. The Baker Street room looked like a 19th century detective’s office, with classic furniture and décor. In some ways, it was Social Escape’s most realistic-looking room in terms of theming, because it was simple enough to not require anything that was too difficult or expensive to pull off.
Despite being a single room, Baker Street was packed with puzzles, and almost every piece of furniture or furnishing had a purpose. There was probably only a couple of things in that room that were just there for decoration, and they never confused us into thinking they might be relevant. The vast majority of the puzzles were padlocks, though there was a wide variety of ways to reach the different solutions, some of which we had never seen before.
We did pretty well to escape the room, though I must admit we should have done it a lot quicker as the kids were not on the ball that morning. The only “clue” we needed came as a result of J simply not checking all the drawers properly when we did out initial search of the room (unfortunately not the first time this has happened), and a couple of times we got stuck on puzzles because Z didn’t look closely enough to spot an obvious signpost. Still, sometimes the struggle is part of the fun, because being challenged is what we love most about Social Escape’s rooms.
The revamp of Baker Street Mystery makes me very excited because version 1 is already excellent. It is proof that you don’t need a massive space, multiple rooms, crazy tech, special effects, or theatrics to make the experience special. Heck, you don’t even to create all your puzzles. As long as it has been designed with attention and care to theming, atmosphere, and game flow, players will have a good time.
Escape time: 53 minutes and 8 seconds
Verdict: A classic one-room escape game that was surprisingly fun. Stay tuned for the upgrade!
Rating: 8.6
Player | Theming | Atmosphere | Puzzles | Creativity | Fun | Average |
H | 8 | 8 | 8.5 | 8 | 9 | 8.3 |
Z | 8.5 | 8.5 | 9 | 8.5 | 9 | 8.7 |
J | 9 | 8.5 | 9 | 8.5 | 9 | 8.8 |
Rating | 8.6 |
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