Update: Scoring Revamp, Canberra, Asia trip coming up!

Escape room reviews are fun, but each one also takes a fair bit of time to write. Plus, I also want to detail some general things happening with our family's escape room adventures and exciting trips coming up. Accordingly, while I work on my backlog of escape room reviews, I'm going to start adding some new blog posts like this one every now and then.

Scoring Revamp

When we first started reviewing escape rooms, we thought the 10-point system across several categories plus a final average would work well in giving readers an idea of how good we think a room is. But the more rooms we played, the more we realised that a precise average score is more difficult and complex than we originally envisioned. First of all, perceptions change over time, especially as we gain more experience and play even better rooms. Secondly, an average of different category scores doesn't necessarily reflect how much we liked a room overall — it can have great scores across the 5 categories but we might not love it for some reason or another, and vice versa.

Therefore, we've decided to revamp the scoring system completely to a new ranking system that places each room in specific rank (eg. A+, B, C-, etc). More on this time come, but we think a "rank" as opposed to a precise "score" will provide more simplicity and give us more leeway in how we judge rooms moving forward.

Canberra

Our family just got back from a trip to Canberra where we played 9 rooms in 3 days (2+4+3)! We had heard some good things about the rooms in Canberra, but we never could have imagined how awesome they'd be. These were some of the best rooms in Australia and some of the best we've played to date. Can't wait to share these reviews with everyone!

New Rooms

After Canberra, we also checked out a brand new escape room in Sydney's Marrickville called Heart of the Mountain. This was a very exciting adventure and one of the most ambitious rooms we've played in Australia. Can't wait to share our review!

This week, we'll also be playing (at last) the two allegedly scariest rooms in Australia, The Sacrifice and Intruders at Mission Escape. E is chickening out so it'll just be me and the kids for The Sacrifice, and since the kids are still a bit young, for Intruders I'll be teaming up with the legendary Escape Room Explorer, one of Australia's best escape room reviewers! It'll just be the two of us, so I'll need to get a spare pair of underpants ready.

We're also excited to check out Mission Escape's latest room, The Unplayed Melody, but haven't locked in a date yet.

Upcoming Asia trip

Our family's obsession with escape rooms has gotten to a point where we plan our holidays around which escape rooms we want to play. Soon, we'll be heading to Taiwan, where we hope to play a handful of games, before a side quest to Osaka, Japan, where we will finally get to return to Studio Escape to play Shadow Zen, the first Japanese room to crack TERPECA's top 100. We were so disappointed when the room was flooded by a burst pipe at the end of last year, which derailed our chance to play it, so fingers crossed nothing happens this time!

We're also planning some other exciting escape room-centric trips for September and the end of the year, but I won't reveal them until everything is locked in.