Search

Mad Monster

H
Oct 18
2 min read

Lost Locks (Gold Coast, Australia)

Time limit: 60 minutes

Age limit: None

Player limit: 2-8

Difficulty: Medium

Awards: TERPECA Nominee (2024)

Date visited: September 2025

Gripped with a sense of FOMO, I decided to book in a room at Lost Locks towards the end of my planning for our Brisbane/Gold Coast trip. I had heard good things about a couple of the rooms at this venue and wanted to see for myself. So was it worth it?

The first thing to note is that Mad Monster is a single-room experience where you are locked in the back of a truck that is transporting a monster inside a crate — so it might not be for everyone. That said, we did not find this "light horror" frightening at all. The vibe was definitely more campy than scary.
The added wrinkle and novelty came from players on opposite sides being chained together for the majority of the game, meaning we had to work together to move or reach in certain directions due to the length of the chain.
The theming was decent, and the sense of immersion was solid due to the lighting and sound design, though it did feel a little too dim at times for me to see some of the writing clearly (the kids had no issues). It was a case of good enough but could have been better.
The puzzles were generally logical and engaging — on the easier side with one puzzle at the end taking us a little while to figure out. With the limited space, however, there were not that many puzzles to solve, and we made it out in just 23 minutes, apparently not an uncommon occurrence among veteran teams. It was originally intended to be a 30-minute game, but was extended to 60 minutes when too many tourists with little or no experience kept failing to escape. The catch-22 is that had we struggled and spent the full 60 minutes in the room, we probably wouldn't have found it nearly as fun.
I started the game chained to the side where the one item in front of me did not come into play until later in the game, so I was more or less useless for the first few minutes trying to solve something I couldn’t yet solve.
The game did have a cool finale, which was unfortunately ruined somewhat when E accidentally pulled off a plank of wood with writing that expressly told us not to touch!