Benito's Lost Pirate Treasure

Queenscliff Maritime Museum (Geelong, Australia)

Time limit: 60 minutes

Age limit: None

Player limit: 2-6

Difficulty: Medium

Date visited: October 2025

Here we go! My whirlwind Melbourne solo trip without the rest of the family was initially just to play Mayhem Manor and Carnivorous at Containaphobia in Geelong… but since I was going all that way and unlikely to be returning any time soon, it was only fitting that I packed the schedule with more escape rooms.

First up, Benito’s Lost Pirate Treasure at the Queenscliff Maritime Museum, which was around a 30-minute drive east of Geelong and about 90 minutes from Melbourne. My friend V picked me up from the airport after my early morning flight and we swung around to pick up the Escape Room Explorer and his partner at a nearby hotel, and away we went!

Even though we had heard some positive buzz about this room online, we didn’t really know what to expect. After all, it’s not common for museums to have escape rooms, but we thought it should be good given that a maritime museum would be well-equipped to design a pirate-themed game. Were we right?

• Benito’s Lost Pirate Treasure was set on an old boat, though nowhere old enough to suggest it came from the pirate era. From the outside, it really just looked like an old building behind a museum. Inside, there were wooden floorboards, but the walls and ceilings were all rusty metal with peeling paint. From an aesthetic perspective, it was somewhat disappointing — a few old wooden tables and barrels, wall decorations, and a whole stack of padlocks spread across the room, mostly on boxes.

• We got off to an ominous start when our lovely GM told us that the designer of the room had never played an escape room — which can’t possibly be true, right?

• Well, at least this explained the homemade vibe of the room and the distinct lack of atmosphere and immersion. To be fair, they definitely made an effort — there were various maritime-themed objects (toys?) and paper scrolls printed with gibberish on the tables and in the drawers, but they served no in-game purpose and could even be considered distracting or even red herrings.

• The majority of the game was basically just searching around for keys to open key locks, or identifying puzzles and trying the solutions on the plethora of number and word locks in the room and hoping it’s the right one. Since the hull of the ship was just an open space and the puzzles were scattered all around, it was difficult to develop any kind of flow. It’s also one of the only escape rooms I’ve done — maybe the only one — where there was no tech at all.

• Minor spoiler: One unintentionally hilarious interaction took place early on when we had to find a pirate book somewhere on the boat. I happened to find such a book in the corner of the room among a pile of other books, and there was actually a cipher on one of the pages that we tried to solve. We were only told, after struggling for several minutes, that the book I picked up was just a children’s book they had put there to keep younger kids occupied!

• And the reason we were not informed of this earlier? There were no cameras in the room, and the walkie talkies used for communication with the GM were broken that day. Consequently, our GM was literally just sitting in a separate space behind a wall, occasionally peering through a small hole to see if we needed assistance or yelling out how much time had elapsed.

• On the bright side, some of the puzzles were pretty decent. While I’m not usually a fan of riddles in escape rooms, this one actually did them quite well. This room designer definitely got rhymes and shanties.

• However, there was one puzzle that inexplicably and unnecessarily applied different colours and it really threw us off. It was only when our GM told us that colour was completely irrelevant that we figured out how to solve it. But if colour was irrelevant, why use different colours in the first place?

• I don’t know if I should be grading this room on a curve since it’s essentially an amateur creation, a first attempt by someone who allegedly has not played an escape room before. If this were true, it’s actually a miraculous effort. That said, at least it’s slightly cheaper than most regular escape rooms, though you should not be expecting professional quality.

• Our GM did say she was in the process of completely overhauling the room and will be adding new puzzles, props, and tech. They are hoping to complete the new build by Christmas 2025, so I’d be interested to see how it looks and what the feedback is like.

Escape time: 50 minutes out of 60

Theming	Atmosphere	Puzzles	Creativity	Fun
C-	D	C+	C	C-

Verdict: Benito’s Lost Pirate Treasure, at least in its first iteration, is best suited to children or novices who haven’t played many escape rooms. As a side quest for visitors to the Queenscliff Maritime Museum, it can offer a fun time. But for experienced players or enthusiasts looking for a professional-level game, it still needs a lot of work.

RANK: D