Stumped

Elude Escape Rooms (Galston, Sydney)

Time limit: 90 minutes

Age limit: Suitable for 13+ (adult required)

Player limit: 2-50

Difficulty: 3/5

Date visited: April 2025

Our family always enjoys our visits to Galston to play at Elude, pound for pound the most challenging escape rooms we've played in Australia to date. After giving their newest room, Magician's Lair, a few months to settle in, we decided to it was time to make the drive again up north again along with my niece C. However, we also felt going all that way to play just one game wasn't going to be satisfying enough, so we added their outdoor escape room, Stumped, to the itinerary.

To be honest, I didn't expect a lot from Stumped. We've played a couple of "outdoor" escape games to date, and while they are enjoyable for what they are, they're simply not the same as an immersive indoor room. But was I wrong to be so dismissive?

• Yes, I was wrong! And I couldn't be happier that I was. Stumped was well-designed, clever, surprising, and hella fun.

• Stumped was very different to a typical outdoor escape game in the sense that all of it takes place on Elude's property. The outdoor games we had played to date designed their puzzles around real-life locations, and as such were restricted to whatever existed in those places as they could not build things on or tamper with public property. This often resulted in awkward puzzles or relied heavily on hunt and seek or the players' mobile phone technology.

• Being built entirely on Elude's massive fields of grass made Stumped an outdoor experience that was (mostly) controlled by the owner/designer. As a result, we got puzzle ideas and difficulty that was largely on par with that of Elude's indoor games, except spread out across a very large space.

• The puzzles were surprisingly varied, requiring not only hunt and seek and observation but a wide range of skills involving logical deduction, teamwork, and even physical aspects.

• The game does require a mobile device as it tells you where the puzzles are located and it is also where you input the answers, but it did not feel restrictive at all or frustrating to navigate. The use of technology was a necessary evil in this case but I think Elude reduced its intrusiveness to a minimum as the focus was still on the puzzles themselves.

• Another great aspect about this game is that it is very flexible. You can have as few as 2 people, or you can have as many as multiple large groups going up against each other at the same time. You can even take breaks in the middle by pressing the pause button.

• Of course, you don't get the same gorgeous set, immersion, and thematic puzzles of an indoor room, but if you have the good fortune of good weather like we did, it's a different kind of puzzle experience where you can get some sun, get some exercise (how intensely depends on how much you want to run around), or even take a break in the middle of the game and enjoy a picnic.

• As a team of 5, we ended up finishing in 68 minutes, just a few minutes off the record. I do feel like if we had split up instead of doing all the puzzles together or ran instead of walked, we might have gotten the record, though it was never something we really considered going in as we had no idea what to expect.

Escape time: 68 minutes out of 90

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

Verdict: An outstanding outdoor escape game that can be enjoyed by different groups in a variety of ways — couples, families, corporate team events — as long as the weather is good!

OVERALL RANK:

H	E	Z	J	C
B+	B+	A-	A-	B-