Sinister

Escape Reality - Central Coast (Tuggerah, Australia)

Time limit: 60 minutes

Player limit: 2-6 players

Age limit: Under 15 requires adult

Difficulty: 3/5

Date visited: January 2026

This was the our fourth and final room at Escape Reality on the Central Coast. Ranked as their hardest and best game, Sinister is a horror game set in an abandoned house you own, and you must find the property deed so you can sell it! Did it live up to the hype?

• Sinister was easily Escape Reality - Central Coast's best room. It's spacious, legitimately scary, and filled with fantastic tech and effects.

• The theming was very strong. Admittedly, haunted houses are easier to pull off, but the set really captured the essence of the overall vibe. I liked how each section of the room had a different design that progressed the story.

• The scares were another highlight of this room. Apart from the dim lighting that fuelled the creepy ambience, there were quite a few lighting and sound effects that added to the sense of gloom and tension, as well as a couple of additional surprises that I won't spoil.

• Note that there was also a live actor, which kept us on our toes and made the experience more unpredictable and even scarier.

• The puzzles were mostly good, requiring a variety of different skills not limited to careful reading, observing, and listening. As with all of Reality Escape's games, this one had a combination of locks and tech puzzles. There was one tech puzzle that for some reason didn't trigger properly when J attempted it. The GM told us to try again but to get someone else to do it, and strangely enough, Z got it to trigger despite doing the exact same thing. Apparently this happens from time to time.

• The difficulty of the puzzles themselves was not substantially higher than their other games, but we took by far the longest in this room for a couple of reasons. The first was the lighting, which bordered on frustrating on a few occasions. This included dim lighting that made it difficult to see and rendered one colour-related puzzle especially challenging, as colours appeared different depending on where you stood and the angle from which you viewed them. A later section of the room was so dark that we could barely see anything at all, and we wasted quite of bit of time simply because we couldn't see where we had to insert a key we had found.

• Another issue we had was the lighting effects, which involved flashing lights and the room periodically going pitch black. This made it very annoying when trying to read and solve puzzles as we had to repeatedly stop and wait for the light to come back on.

• The other thing that tripped us up was an insane dexterity puzzle. We had done the same puzzle in a few other rooms before, but never one that was configured to such a degree of difficulty and placed under such dim lighting. We literally wasted 12 minutes on just this puzzle alone, and only got there in the end with a bit of creative "cheating" using other objects we found in the room. Apparently the GM has to bypass this puzzle for a lot of teams (and most don't even get this far).

• In all, this was a really good but flawed horror room. The theming, scares, and puzzles were all strong, but the lighting issues and unnecessarily difficult dexterity puzzle prevented it from being a truly great experience.

Escape time: 51 minutes and 15 seconds

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

Verdict: A very good horror room with excellent scares, tech, and effects, but failed to reach its full potential due to a couple of major issues.

OVERALL RANK:

H	E	Z	J
A-	B-	A-	A-