Haunted

Really fun experience, but more of a haunted house than escape room

I DON’T HAVE YOUR DAMN BABY! Jesus H. F*** I’m not sure my heart rate has fully come back down after this one. Haunted is very much Doctor Q’s crown jewel; a fully immersive 90-minute horror experience complete with live actor(s) and a maze-like environment to run around in terror. Oh joy. On every level, this is an exhilarating play-through. Forget the puzzles, forget the story, if we’re just talking about the scares and the atmosphere, Haunted did a fantastic job of terrorising the shit out of me and my friends. The live actor was consistently brutal in their choice of appearance, popping up at some of the most vulnerable and unexpected of opportunities, it was HELL. And due to the labyrinth nature of the space, losing your bearings becomes inevitable. We were constantly forgetting which way we’d just come from AND which rooms we’d already explored. I’ve honestly never felt more like a sitting duck which I guess really added to the immersion/dread of the whole thing. Now if we ARE talking about the puzzles and the story, it’s a pretty rough venture. Doctor Q tells the story of this one through HUGE chunks of text spelt out on a plethora of A4 sheets of paper found around the game. This, as you can imagine, became very tedious very quickly, but I think what’s worse is that even with this level of exposition, I still had no idea what was happening due to the adrenaline. If you’re gonna go all out in this genre, I think it’s best to just keep the narrative simple. As for the puzzles, for a 90-minute experience I think I counted about 4 or 5 in total which most of the time didn’t make any sense or needed to be heavily clarified by the GM over the walkie talkie, not good! The space itself was huge and impressive in its layout but just so poor in the amount of damage that it has sustained over the years. While the “rundown” look lends itself well to the theme, there’s only so many holes in the plaster you can get away with before it looks simply unprofessional. Overall an outrageous game that I’d recommend to the horror-buffs and thrill seekers but not to my fellow puzzle fiends. 6.8/10 🔏🧩

Definitely the best escape room I’ve done, I saw a lot of people complaining how the puzzles were bad or underwhelming and to an extent that is true but most of them are quite fun and engaged, only problem with them for me is once you do it it’s hard to tell if you have completed or not the cues for completing the puzzles are quite subtle which can be hard to notice at times. The thing that definitely stood out for this room was the sheer size of it, the room used the space really well with almost like never ending hallways type of feel, the other thing it does really well is the scares definitely the thing that ties everything together and mixed with the pitch black and the dimly lit candles it was absolutely terrifying. For me I really like how they pretty much give you complete free roam you can choose where to run off too or choose where to check out next but that was definitely the scariest bit about it because you never knew what was behind each corner. If you like horror escape rooms this is a must try tho it is definitely on the intense side so keep that in mind.

great atmosphere, less puzzle focused though more survival focus

The game was a lot of fun, it was scary (we told them to ramp it up) and so fun. Some puzzles were simple and others unsolvable without outside knowledge (a card game). There were holes in the walls everywhere presumably where players had been too scared and silly, but there were so many holes, my guess is they dont fix anything.

Fantastic experience and perhaps the only horror themed escape room in Melbourne with a live actor. Its an option for the adrenaline junky and horror fan. I look forward to seeing if they build on this ;)