Kraken: Nemo's Revenge

Escape This (Sydney, Australia)

Time limit: 60 minutes

Age limit: 9+

Player limit: 2-8

Difficulty: 8/10

Date visited: August 2025

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later: my first thumbs down on Morty.

This dubious honour goes to Kraken: Nemo's Revenge, played on our second visit to Escape This. Even with modest expectations, we came away bitterly disappointed.

If I had to say some nice things about the room, it would be the theming, which adequately replicated the interior of a submarine. There was a steampunk vibe to the props, which looked metallic, sturdy, and weighty. However, while the room did have multiple areas, they all looked very similar and had the same generic feel, with nothing substantively different to offer a sense of freshness.

The downfall of Kraken ultimately lay in its puzzles and flow, which were arguably the worst we had seen in our 70+ rooms to date. Nothing in the game felt intuitive. While none of the puzzles were very difficult, we wasted so much time wondering what we had to do next because the room had very poor guidance and was almost completely devoid of any signposting. There was no connection between many of the clues and puzzles — we simply had to wander around and fiddle with everything in the room to see what could be activated or interacted with. A particular device might be the key to solving the next puzzle, yet they are on opposite ends of the room or in a different space altogether, with basically no suggestion that they are related.

The solutions to several puzzles were also illogical, extremely finicky, or worse, merely required guess and check. The lack of lighting certainly did not help either. There was actually one number "puzzle" (if you could call it that) where I almost didn't try the correct solution because I figured the answer couldn't be that stupid — and yet it was! There were times when we wondered whether we should use the in-built intercom system to ask for help, but we never did because our problem was having no idea what to do next, rather than not knowing how to solve a puzzle.

It was amazing how much the design of this room stuffed up. Crawl spaces are usually fun, but not when it's the ONLY way to travel between rooms and especially not when certain puzzles require having to repeatedly go back and forth. There was a voiceover from Captain Nemo that got played time to time, but most of what was said was useless (like telling you how much time has elapsed) and did very little to advance the story, if at all. And with a name like Kraken, you'd think the "climax" of the room would deliver something special, but what we ended up getting was rather lame.

The result was an immensely tedious and frustrating experience. Kraken came across as the kind of commercially-driven room that was rushed into production without much attention to detail or care for the player experience. And perhaps for the first time in an escape room, we didn't have much fun.

Escape time: 58 minutes out of 60

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

Verdict: An underwhelming experience that ticks all the wrong boxes.

OVERALL RANK:

H	Z	J
D-	D-	C-