Elude Escape Rooms (Galston, Sydney)
Time limit: 75 minutes
Age limit: None (at least 1 adult required)
Player limit: 2-6 (recommended 4+)
Difficulty: 5/5
Awards: TERPECA Nominee (2021)
Date visited: January 2025
Yin Yang was our final room at Elude for the time being, and we may have saved the best for last! Interestingly, the theme of the room is simply the concept and philosophy of Yin Yang. While there is an end goal which you must reach in order to escape, the room itself has no real story or narrative. To me, it proved that you don’t need a background story to make an escape room awesome.
Yin Yang is a beautiful room that really captures the serenity of the theme, but it certainly didn’t calm me down as the clock started winding down! Once again, there was an assortment of different puzzles, many of which we had not seen before and some of which amazed us with their ingenuity. There were no puzzles that required any outside knowledge, though relevant knowledge or experience definitely would have helped for a couple of them.
For us, the most difficult part of the room was probably a killer dexterity puzzle, though multiple puzzles challenged us to our limits and we had to ask for a hint or two in order to progress. Having failed Framed and Torquay partly because of our refusal to ask for help, we knew we couldn’t be shy if we wanted to escape in time. This was a multi-linear room ranked as Elude’s most difficult (tied with Framed, which we didn’t come close to completing). Team work was essential, and I’d recommend 4 players or more unless you are super experienced. Fortunately, we managed to escape with just under 4 minutes left, a sign that we have indeed improved since the last time we were here.
After playing all currently available rooms at Elude, I would say Yin Yang is definitely one of our favourites. The theming, atmosphere, and size of all their rooms are all pretty good but not spectacular (though Ying Yang and Torquay are the prettier ones), yet they remain some of the most fun we’ve played. And that’s the wonderful thing about escape rooms — they can be great for completely different reasons. We love the rooms at Studio Escape in Osaka and the Cipher Room in Sydney because of their immersive atmosphere and theatrics; we love the Curium Experience because of the size, tech, and physical nature of the room; and we love the rooms at Elude because they have the most clever and challenging puzzles.
PS: Elude is currently finishing up a couple of new rooms with really cool, exciting themes. Hopefully, they will be ready some time in 2025. We can’t wait to come back and play them!
Escape time: 71 minutes out of 75
Verdict: A gorgeously themed room with some of the trickiest and challenging puzzles we've seen to date!
Rating: 9.1
Player | Theming | Atmosphere | Puzzles | Creativity | Fun | Average |
H | 8.5 | 8 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 8.9 |
E | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 |
Z | 9.5 | 8.5 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 9.2 |
J | 9 | 9 | 10 | 9.5 | 9 | 9.3 |
C | 9.5 | 9 | 9 | 8 | 10 | 9.1 |
Rating | 9.1 |
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