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Unholy Cottage

H
Jan 8
2 min read

Scapegoats Escape Rooms (Upper Hutt, New Zealand)

Time limit: 60 minutes

Player limit: 2-6

Age limit: Under 14s require adult supervision

Difficulty: 8/10

Date visited: December 2025

We finished The Cartel and went straight into Unholy Cottage, Scapegoats' highest rated room on Morty. This was a spooky horror room with occult themes, but it's all driven by atmosphere, with no live actors or major jump scares. Here are my thoughts:

We enjoyed this one more than The Cartel, which was already very solid. The atmosphere was great and at times genuinely creepy. It's obviously much easier to create tension and immersion in an abandoned cottage than a biker bar, but we also liked the puzzles in this one more. Even though it's technically harder according to their website, we found the puzzles more logical and less ambiguous.
This one was also quite spacious and had multiple spaces, some of which were hidden. I liked how different each space was, and was particularly impressed with the somewhat realistic "outdoor" area, complete with trees and dirt on the ground. The decor, like in The Cartel, was very strong.
We did have to play most of this room holding flashlights in the dark, which has happened to us more often than I can count. It was fun the first few times and adds to the atmosphere, but my eyes are starting to get tired of the gimmick. It always feels like half the difficulty comes from spotting and seeings things under dim or non-existent lighting. I would much prefer it if these rooms only made darkness a short, temporary part of the game, not the entire game.
The puzzles were varied and mostly matched the theme well. There were elements of hunt and seek, pattern and symbol recognition, physical positioning, and of course, the dreaded black light. Most of them led to a padlock of some sort.
We did ask for a clue at one stage, which turned out to be a really silly oversight on our part. We were apparently not the first group to completely miss the obvious.