F.E.A.R.

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 playing it with my boys. But with so many rooms — especially scary rooms — now under our belts, we were confident that we would be able to tackle it with no problems. So did the game live up to the hype?

• I liked the premise: You are thieves who believe a woman living in the woods has priceless jewels in her cabin. The aim is to break in and steal them, but you might soon find yourself in a predicament where survival becomes more important.

• This was definitely the best room at Scram Parramatta and probably Scram's best room overall before the introduction of their newer rooms in Penrith, in particular The Butcher. I can also imagine it being the "scariest room in Australia" when it was launched 4 years ago, though it now lags behind the newer, flashier games like Intruders at Mission, The Soul Catcher at Cubic, and of course, the world-ranked Carnivorous at Containaphobia.

• That said, F.E.A.R. held up pretty well and will probably always remain a strong horror room that lovers of scary games will appreciate and enjoy. There are multiple spaces, a good mix of traditional padlocks and tech, and plenty of jump scares and potential jump scares (which may or may not involve a live actor) that will keep players on edge.

• But was it really that scary? Not by my current standards of what is truly terrifying, but as many GMs have told us, we have a very high scare threshold. As usual, it was the fear of possibly being jump scared that scared us more than the actual jump scares themselves. However, the group immediately before us, comprising four adults, told us they could not finish the room because they were too terrified to focus on the puzzles.

• Speaking of puzzles, I thought the ones in this room were logical and mostly made sense in the space. They were varied, fun, and not inherently difficult, but we struggled a lot more than we would have liked for one very annoying reason: Lack of lighting.

• The unnecessarily dim or virtually non-existent lighting in some areas was my biggest complaint about the room. Before going in, they made sure we had no phones or smartwatches, which is common and not a problem, but they also didn't provide any flashlights. That's not usually too big of a problem if they offer other fixed (like desk lamps) or portable (like hand-held lanterns) light sources where necessary, but we didn't get any of that either.

• As a result, everything took longer than it should have. The final section of the room, in particular, was extremely dark, to the extent where I literally could not tell if I was looking at numbers or letters on a lock. Even J, who can spot a sushi restaurant a thousand yards down the street (when hungry), struggled to see, and there was absolutely nothing we could do because there was simply no light source we could direct onto the lock. There was also an instance where we didn't know we had solved a puzzle because the key had dropped onto the ground and we could not see where it was.

• Even though we escaped with 20+ minutes to spare, it felt like we were stuck on certain puzzles for much longer than desired solely due to the lighting. When I raised the lighting issue with the GM at the end, I was told it was intentional to add to the difficulty, which was why they made it a 70-minute room. I get that darkness can be used appropriately to boost the atmosphere and immersion, but using it to make the puzzles more difficult is a misstep in my opinion. Personally, I would have preferred it if it were a typical 60-minute room where I could see better.

• I don't mean to sound too negative. Despite the lighting issue, this is still an excellent horror game that we really enjoyed and would recommend.

Escape time: 47 minutes and 20 seconds out of 70

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

Verdict: A well-made horror room that ticks the boxes in terms of theming, atmosphere, puzzle ideas, and scare delivery, but is let down by the forced use of darkness to make the puzzles more difficult.

OVERALL RANK:

H	Z	J
A-	A-	A-