Eat 'n' Run

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 possible, we drove another 30 minutes south from Hamilton to the town of Te Awamutu, home of Get Out Escape Rooms, an establishment rated highly by enthusiasts for its quickly concepts and challenging puzzles. The game we chose here was Eat 'n' Run, a recommendation that happened to earn a TERPECA nomination in 2025 (meaning someone in the world who has played over 200 escape rooms considered this one of their 10 favourite games).

Did the room live up to expectations?

• This was a quirky room with a very interesting theme — a 1985 diner where you must figure out what you ate and drank before you're allowed to leave and go home to stop a catastrophe. In short, as you solve various puzzles, you discover what 4 main dishes, 4 drinks, and 4 desserts you had consumed, and you must calculate and print out the total bill so you can pay it off. Doesn't make any sense at all, but we went along with it!

• The theming of the room was a little underwhelming. There's a bar, dining table, and jukebox, but it's essentially a single-space room, or if you want to be kind, a 1.5-space room as there's a short swinging saloon door to another small area that's initially locked. The decor, while adequate, was looking its age, and some props that came across as worn and occasionally grimy.

• The charm of the game lay in its unusual premise and the partly multi-linear puzzles, which included a surprising amount of hunt and seek, as well as plenty of logical deduction, which usually led to a padlock of some sort. There were a couple of hi-tech props and devices and even some physical puzzles.

• Where we struggled with this room was not knowing the limits and boundaries of what we were allowed and not allowed to do. There was one particular puzzle that we (correctly) thought might require the insertion of an object, but I was very unsure whether we should do it as if felt like we were going to damage something if we were wrong. A bit more signposting or guidance here would have been appreciated.

• And the puzzle we had the most trouble with confused us with an ambiguous term, and actually required us to remove an object and take it elsewhere, though it felt like it was glued down (adhesive residue was accidentally applied to the bottom) and we were afraid to use excessive force.

• In the end, we managed to get all the solutions correct, but due to some miscalculation (probably fat fingers on the calculator), we ended up with a higher bill — which the owner of the bar obviously didn't mind lol.

Escape time: 52 minutes out of 60

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

Verdict: A unique and quirky room with some interesting puzzles and concepts we had not seen before, but was starting to show its age and had a couple of frustrating issues.

OVERALL RANK:

H	E	Z	J
B	C-	B-	C+