Elude Escape Rooms (Galston, Sydney)
Time limit: 60 minutes
Age limit: None (at least 1 adult required)
Player limit: 2-6 (recommended 2+)
Difficulty: 4.5/5
Date visited: October 2024
After enjoying a delicious lunch nearby at Sugar Salt Cafe (recommended by Julia, the co-owner of Elude and our GM), we returned to tackle our second room of the day, Torquay.
By most accounts, Torquay is Elude’s best room. It is also considered slightly easier than Framed, which we failed to complete earlier in the day. Well, it still wasn’t easy enough, because we failed again — albeit getting much closer to finishing this time.
Torquay is a beautiful beach-themed room about a treasure hunt for a gold bar. It is colourful, smells great, and is the first room I’ve ever seen with artificial sand to simulate the beach environment. You would think that would make the room all messy and nasty, but like everything about Elude, it’s all super clean and immaculate.
As with Framed, the atmosphere and immersion in Torquay takes a bit of a back seat to the puzzles. From a purely puzzle-solving perspective, Torquay is arguably the best room we’ve done to date. The sheer number of puzzles, the incredible variety, and the astonishing creativity involved in designing them and crafting the props was simply breathtaking. These challenges stretched not only the limits of our brains but also our senses. We actually thought we were progressing rather well, but as it turned out, just getting stuck a little longer than usual on a couple of puzzles was enough to completely derail our chances of completing the room. My tip would be to ask for a tip as soon as you can’t figure out a puzzle in the first couple of minutes.
Despite not getting the satisfying conclusion we sought at Elude, we left extremely impressed with the rooms they have to offer. I’m not sure if it’s worth paying to do Torquay again, but I wouldn’t write it off completely just yet. As noted in my Framed review, Elude currently has 4 indoor rooms and 2 outdoor rooms, with many more in the works, including a BnB overnight stay room! We will definitely be back soon to try their other two rooms, Perpetual Motion and Yin Yang, this time with our A-games.
Escape time: Failed!
Rating: 9.4
Player | Theming | Atmosphere | Puzzles | Creativity | Fun | Average |
H | 9 | 8 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 9 |
E | 9 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 9.6 |
Z | 9 | 9 | 10 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.4 |
J | 9.5 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 9.5 | 9.6 |
Rating | 9.4 |
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