Motel

Escape Games Melbourne (Melbourne, Australia)

Time limit: 60 minutes

Age limit: Under 16 requires adult

Player limit: 2-7

Difficulty: 4.5/5

Date visited: October 2025

We were still amped up after our transcendent experience at Carnivorous in Geelong the night before, so my friend V and I decided to do one more room in the morning before my return flight to Sydney. As a two-man team, we decided upon Motel at Escape Games Melbourne to take advantage of a Groupon deal that made it half the price of doing a room at Rush Escape (my first choice).

• Motel was a fairly standard traditional escape room with a moderate level of difficulty. Nothing in terms of theming or puzzles that will blow you away, but solid enough for a good time.

• The backstory takes you into a dingy motel where the previous occupant appears to have disappeared, and you have to string together the clues to figure out what happened.

• As a dingy motel, the aesthetics fit the theme — creaky wooden furniture, a bit run-down, dim lighting. The set design was that of an older-style escape room where not every prop made sense in the space, and the transitions between spaces weren’t as smooth as they could have been. There were also a few immersion-breaking notes to tell players not to touch certain things or that certain props did not contain puzzles.

• The puzzles were mostly old-school as well — mostly padlocks, with a few mag locks triggered by correct inputs. They mainly relied on locating certain clues around the room and then making connections to identify a code number or word.

• I guess you could say there’s a horror element to the room because of the story, but there were no jump scares; maybe a couple of creepy atmospheric moments at most.

• We actually needed 2 extra minutes to complete this room in the end. After smashing through the first section, and the first couple of puzzles in the second section, we wasted an insane amount of time on two specific puzzles:

  • The first was because a piece of fake glass (plastic) was so dirty and scratched that we literally could not see the object we needed to get behind it. It was only after about 10-15 minutes of looking around that our GM asked if we had completed the corresponding puzzle (even though she said she’d check in on us if we hadn’t solved anything in 5 minutes), and we realised we had missed it completely!

  • The second was kind of my fault. There was a particular prop hidden in a section of the room that I thought was not part of the game because it was something that looked completely out of place compared to all the other décor in the room. As it turned out, it was actually a puzzle, so we probably wasted another 10 minutes by ignoring it.

• Without these two fatal hiccups (or with some earlier prompting by the GM), I think we would have made it out with plenty of time to spare. So even though it’s ranked as their equal hardest room, I think most experienced groups should have no trouble, while less experienced teams should escape in time with just a handful of few hints.

Escape time: 62 minutes

Theming	Atmosphere	Puzzles	Creativity	Fun
B	B-	B	B-	B

Verdict: A solid room in every respect. While it does look quite run-down and it is an older game with zero wow factor, I still much prefer this kind of experience to hollow new-generation rooms that have good aesthetics/tech but terrible puzzles and flow.

RANK: B-