Jurassic Island

The Mystery Rooms Geelong (Geelong, Australia)

Time limit: 60 minutes

Age limit: None

Player limit: 4-10

Difficulty: 4/5

Date visited: October 2025

This room… this was not my kind of room.

It was bound to happen eventually – my first Indestroom experience. Indestroom is probably the best-known escape room supplier in the industry, offering a wide range of products ranging from escape cubes, portable games and escape room props to entire escape rooms. That Quizy game show I’ve seen pop up in a few places (like Escape This in Sydney) is one of their products too. Check out their kits here, which include promotional videos and prices.

I’ve heard mixed things about Indestroom games. They are generally well-made and aesthetically pleasing, but also rather generic and lacking in imagination. There is also a danger of playing the same room at different establishments if owners are not upfront and simply change the name. For instance, their Jumanji-themed room is quite common across Australia. However, Indestroom-style games do play a valuable role in the industry, as they can ensure new escape room businesses can start bringing in revenue right away. Many owners also put their own spin on the room by making significant changes to ensure it becomes a unique experience.

Anyway, Jurassic Island at The Mystery Rooms Geelong was my first Indestroom game, and I knew this before going in. The venue was an enormous warehouse-style hall with super high ceilings and multiple rooms configured like large cubicles. We also saw a whole bunch of these Indestroom “Escape Cubes”, which are basically single-room themed experiences that are fast to assemble and apparently offer fantastic return on investment because they allude to familiar IPs like Star Wars and Harry Potter.

When I visited in October 2025, it appeared all of the games at The Mystery Rooms were purchased from Indestroom. But Jurassic Island was considered their most “epic” experience; it’s also one of the most expensive ones on the Indestroom website, so I thought it was worth checking out. So how was it? Warning: minor spoilers ahead.

• Not good. Jurassic Island was sadly the worst escape room I’ve played to date. Worse than Benito’s Lost Pirate Treasure, the “amateur” escape room I played earlier that day. Jurassic Island was unintuitive, frustrating, and dare I say, boring — the exact opposite of what an escape room should be.

• The aesthetics of the room were fine. The props were of good quality and included computer screens, dinosaur props, posters, and even a small model of the island. But none of it was cohesive or made much sense in the space. It just felt like a bunch of random dinosaur-related props and ideas thrown into a room. Consequently, there was no atmosphere to speak of. And if there was a backstory, it must have been so flimsy that I missed it.

• The puzzles were the worst part of the room. It was not looking good from the very start. One of the first puzzles involved simply guessing the correct word from a whole bunch of words on a chart.

• It actually got worse after that, as we were presented with one illogical and confusing puzzle after another. There was one particular puzzle where we had to identify where to put objects based on certain distinguishing characteristics, but the same characteristics basically applied to ALL the objects — so it was essentially guess and check once again.

• The frustration escalated as we moved on to the later sections of the room. There was one very difficult physical puzzle that we took a long time to solve, and apparently, it stumps most teams. So the GMs decided to hide a “solution sheet” in a random spot in another section of the room, and if a team got stuck for too long, the GM would tell them where the sheet was hidden.

• In fact, I can’t think of a single good puzzle in this room. There was an inexplicable amount of trial and error, and even really ridiculous stuff like basic spelling and arithmetic. Not puzzles that incorporated or put a twist on spelling or arithmetic — you literally just needed to know how to spell a word or add and subtract.

• The worst puzzle was probably the “magnet” maze, because the magnet had almost no sensitivity. It required no skill and we knew exactly what we had to do, but executing it was insanely frustrating.

• Being a dinosaur-themed room, I was hoping for something exciting and cool, like maybe animatronics or even just a larger model of some kind. But what we got instead — when the “dinosaurs are coming” warning sounded — was laughably silly.

Escape time: 50 minutes and 32 seconds

Theming	Atmosphere	Puzzles	Creativity	Fun
C+	D	F	D	E

Verdict: I hate crapping on rooms, but this rant was cathartic. Jurassic Island, in its raw state, was not a good experience. I think the foundations for something much better are there, but owners can’t simply buy an entire escape room outright without making the improvements or changes needed to enhance the player experience — or even just to make the game functional. If I was a young child, or if this was the first escape room I had ever played, then maybe I wouldn’t have disliked it so much. But when you’ve played some really good ones, rooms like this stand out for all the wrong reasons.

RANK: E