Da Vinci Down Under, Adventure Escape Room in Chadstone
Adventure • Chadstone, Melbourne • 60 minutes • 2 to 4 players
The story
Leonardo da Vinci's studio was guarded by the Secret Society to protect a map revealing the locations of his never-before-seen inventions, until a violent villain found the studio, but not the map, and killed the last guardian. While police investigate, you and your friends sneak in with one hour to crack the code, retrieve the map, and escape before the villain returns.
At a glance
Suitable for: All ages. A clever, all-ages code-cracking treasure hunt with no scares, and one of our toughest puzzle challenges. Under-16s welcome with a participating adult.
A code-cracking treasure hunt with no scares, no darkness and nothing that chases you. Genuinely all-ages. Like our other Chadstone puzzle rooms it is one of our toughest, so scariness and difficulty are separate here: not scary at all, but a real brain-teaser.
Pricing: $74 per person for 2 players, scaling down to $72 per person for 4. Children aged 9 to 13 are $42 each, with at least one paying adult per room.
Book Da Vinci Down Under at Chadstone
Not ready to lock in the whole group?
Hold your preferred time with a single-player booking ($100 a room), which secures the room while you round up your team. Everyone else pays the difference when you arrive. Booking is instant, and you can reschedule for free up to 2 hours before your start time.
Is this theme right for you?
Da Vinci Down Under is a Renaissance treasure hunt: Leonardo da Vinci's studio hid a map to his lost inventions, guarded for centuries by a Secret Society, until a violent villain found the studio but not the map, and now you have one hour to crack the code, retrieve the map and escape before he returns. If you loved The Da Vinci Code and its sequels, the hidden ciphers, secret societies and the Illuminati, or the artefact-hunting adventure of National Treasure, this room was built for you. It is one of our toughest and most satisfying puzzle rooms, a clever code-cracking adventure with no scares, so it suits all ages, teams and anyone who loves a real brain-teaser. Fans of the films and books will love the mystery, and you do not need to know them to have a great time.
Why book with Rush
- Melbourne owned and operated. More than a decade building Melbourne's highest-rated escape rooms, every room designed, built and run in-house.
- A 4.9 star experience. Rated by thousands of players across our venues.
- Bespoke, never off the shelf. Every room is designed and built by our own team, not bought as a kit.
- Handmade and authentic. We work with local artists and restore vintage set pieces, so every room feels real and fully immersive.
- Always being upgraded. Our in-house team is constantly refining the tech, puzzles and sets, so the rooms stay cutting edge.
- Our delight guarantee. If your experience falls short, tell us and we will make it right.
Planning a birthday or corporate event?
Da Vinci Down Under is a favourite for corporate groups and team outings. This room holds up to 4, so larger groups split across rooms at Chadstone and play at the same time. For corporate team-building and group functions, see our team-building page or email enquiries@rushescapegame.com.au. For birthdays, parties, and hens or bucks nights, see our celebrations page. To hold a date, book a single player as a deposit.
Good to know before you go
- No experience or special equipment needed, just your group.
- Wear comfortable clothing and closed-in shoes.
- Arrive 10 minutes before your start time.
- Players under 16 are welcome with a participating adult in the room.
- You are never locked in and can step out at any time.
Escape rooms in Chadstone
Da Vinci Down Under is one of our toughest and most satisfying puzzle rooms, and one of three escape rooms at our Chadstone venue on Warrigal Road, 150 metres from Oakleigh Station. A clever, all-ages code-cracking treasure hunt, it sits alongside the spy heist Mission:Possible and the horror room HackSaw: Remastered, so a group can pick their style. It is one of the best code-cracking and treasure-hunt escape rooms in Melbourne's south-east, easy to reach from Oakleigh, Chadstone, Carnegie and Clayton.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Da Vinci Down Under based on The Da Vinci Code?
- It is our own original Renaissance mystery, made for fans of that world. If you loved The Da Vinci Code and its sequels, the ciphers and secret societies, or the treasure-hunting of National Treasure, you will feel right at home. It is a clever, all-ages code-cracking adventure with no scares, and you do not need to know any of them to enjoy it.
- What is Da Vinci Down Under like?
- It is a Renaissance treasure hunt through da Vinci's studio for a map to his lost inventions, all clever code-cracking and teamwork rather than scares.
- Is it physical? Do we need to be fit?
- No. The challenge is mental, not physical. You will not need strength or fitness to play, just teamwork and a bit of lateral thinking.
- How hard is it? Is it good for beginners?
- It is one of our toughest rooms, so it rewards a group that likes a real challenge. First-timers are welcome, and hints from your games master keep it fair.
- Is it suitable for kids?
- Yes, it suits all ages with no scares. Under-16s are welcome with a participating adult in the room.
- What is the best group size?
- It plays with 2 to 4 players, and larger groups split across rooms at Chadstone to compete head to head.
- Is it good for team-building?
- Yes, it is a favourite for corporate groups and team outings. See our team-building page or email enquiries@rushescapegame.com.au for group bookings or tailored pricing.
Getting here & what's nearby
53 Warrigal Road, Chadstone VIC.
150 metres from Oakleigh Station.
Get directions → •
Parking nearby → •
Restaurants & bars nearby →
Oakleigh's Eaton Mall dining strip and the Chadstone shopping centre are close by for food and drinks. Questions? Email oakleigh@rushescapegame.com.au or call 04 6871 3389.
More rooms at Chadstone
Other Rush venues across Melbourne
Hawthorn: HackSaw, Strangest Thing, The Nine-Nine | Book Hawthorn
St Kilda: Alice in Wonderland, The Conjoining, Treasure Island, The Last of Them | Book St Kilda
What is a code-cracking escape room, and how hard is Da Vinci Down Under?
Five out of five, which is the top of our scale, and one of only two rooms we rate there. A code-cracking room is one where the antagonist is a cipher rather than a monster or a security system: everything you need is in front of you, deliberately encoded by somebody who did not want it read by the wrong person.
It also caps at four players rather than six, and that is a design decision rather than a space constraint. A room this dense only works when everybody is holding something. At six, two people end up spectating, which is the worst hour an escape room can give you. Four is the number at which nobody is idle.
So this is a room for small, experienced groups: two players who want a genuine challenge, a couple after a date night that is actually difficult, three or four friends who keep escaping rooms with twenty minutes to spare and want to know what it feels like to be beaten. There is no horror content, nothing frightening, and no live actors, here or in any of our sixteen rooms. The pressure is entirely intellectual.
Leonardo is the best escape room subject who ever lived
This is not marketing. The historical Leonardo da Vinci worked in a way that is almost indistinguishable from designing a puzzle room, and the reason he keeps turning up in codes-and-conspiracies fiction is that he genuinely did encode his work.
He wrote in mirror script: right to left, every letter reversed, so his notebooks read correctly only when held to a glass. Historians still argue about why. Left-handedness and smudged ink is the practical explanation. Secrecy is the romantic one. Either way, the effect is that the most prolific notebooks of the Renaissance are a page of nonsense until you apply one transformation, which is precisely the structure of a good cipher puzzle.
The notebooks themselves, the codices, are not organised. Anatomy sits next to hydraulics, a shopping list next to a flying machine, a joke next to a study of how water moves around an obstacle. Thousands of pages, scattered after his death, reassembled over centuries into collections that are still being reordered. A body of work that arrives out of sequence and has to be reconstructed by the reader is, again, exactly what a group does in an escape room.
Then there is what he was actually studying: the mechanics of flight, the anatomy hidden under the skin, the geometry underlying a human body, the way light behaves, machines that would not be built for four hundred years. The unifying idea of his working life was that everything visible is the surface of a system you can work out if you look hard enough. That belief is the whole emotional content of a code-cracking room, and it is why this genre feels satisfying in a way that being chased never does.
What the room draws on
The cipher and the manuscript
Cryptography has been a form of entertainment for as long as it has been a tool. The vocabulary is deep and every item in it is a mechanism: the substitution cipher, the anagram, the shifted alphabet, the keyed cipher that needs a word only two people know, the cryptex that destroys its own contents if forced, the palimpsest with older writing underneath, the manuscript nobody has ever decoded. The Voynich manuscript has resisted the best cryptanalysts alive for a century and may simply be a very elaborate joke, which is somehow the most satisfying possible outcome.
What makes encoded documents such good escape room material is that they carry their own instructions. A locked box tells you nothing. A page of mirror writing tells you there is a rule, that the rule is simple, and that you are expected to find it. That is a generous puzzle even when it is a hard one.
The secret society
The second strand is the conspiracy tradition: an order that has guarded something across centuries, initiates, symbols carved where nobody looks, a chain of custody running through architecture and painting, and a modern seeker following it backwards. The historical Bavarian Illuminati existed for about nine years in the eighteenth century and were suppressed, which has never once stopped anybody enjoying the idea.
The reason the trope endures is that it converts history into a treasure map. Every old building becomes a document. Every symbol becomes a signpost. For a room designer it means a set can be dense with meaning without anything needing to be explained, because the audience already assumes that everything on the wall is there for a reason. In this room, they are right.
The treasure hunt, brought south
The third strand is the hunt itself. A relic worth having, a rival who wants it, a hidden studio, a map to lost inventions, and one hour before the wrong person comes back. Leonardo's studio hid a map to his lost work, a secret society guarded it for centuries, and a violent man has found the studio but not the map.
If you loved The Da Vinci Code and its sequels, the hidden ciphers, the symbol-hunting and the secret orders, or the artefact-chasing of National Treasure, this room was built for you. It is our own original story, not an adaptation of anything.
How we rate difficulty, and why this room is a five
Two independent scales, because they measure different things. Difficulty is the puzzles, one to five stars. Scare is the experience, four named tiers.
Da Vinci Down Under is Not scary and five out of five on difficulty. Both ends of the range at once. It is rated all ages, and all ages does not mean easy: there is nothing here that would upset a child, and a great deal that will beat one, along with most adults.
A five means more layers than the hour comfortably holds, solutions that depend on connecting things found in different places, and the real possibility of doing everything right and still running out of time. Most groups do not escape it. We would rather tell you that now than have you book it expecting a relaxed evening.
Who this room is for, and who it is not
Book it if: you have played several escape rooms and want to be properly tested, you are two to four people, you like ciphers, symbols, history and conspiracy, or you want a date night with an actual challenge in it.
Pick something else if: it is a first escape room, you have five or six people, you have young children who will get frustrated, or you want atmosphere and story more than problem solving.
Player cap. Two to four, not six. If your group is larger, split across the three rooms at Chadstone and play at the same time, or choose a six-player room. Arriving with five is the one thing that does not work here.
Escape rooms for two. This and Mission:Possible next door are the two rooms we recommend for a pair. Most rooms designed for six feel thin with two people in them. These do not, because they were built for a small team from the start.
Age. All ages, with the difficulty caveat above. Bright, engaged children enjoy it when the adults are doing the heavy lifting. A child expecting to solve it will have a hard hour. There is no easy all-ages room at Chadstone, so for a kids birthday consider Hawthorn or South Yarra.
Nothing frightening. No horror content, no darkness used to unsettle anyone, nothing jumps out, no live actors here or anywhere in the network.
Language. This is the room where our design principle mattered most. The puzzles are deliberately built so they do not depend on English fluency, which is a genuine constraint in a genre built on wordplay and anagrams. Almost everything here is solved through symbols, patterns, objects, numbers and physical logic instead. A group with mixed English plays this room on equal footing.
Questions people ask before booking
Is this the hardest escape room at Rush?
Equal hardest, with Mission:Possible in the same building. Nothing else in the network is rated above four out of five.
Why only four players?
Because a five out of five room needs everybody working. At six, two people end up watching. Four is the number where nobody is idle.
Can two people do it?
Yes, and it is one of the few rooms genuinely worth doing as a pair. Built for a small team, so it does not feel empty with two. Expect to be pushed hard.
Is it scary?
Not at all. Our lowest tier. No horror content, no live actors, nothing jumps out.
How is it different to Mission:Possible?
Same difficulty, same player cap, different genre entirely. Da Vinci is code-cracking: ciphers, symbols and history. Mission:Possible is infiltration: a vault and a security system. Do both if you want the pair.
Do we need to know anything about Leonardo or history?
No. The room briefs you on everything and nothing requires outside knowledge. Knowing the history adds enjoyment and no advantage.
Our hardest rooms, ranked
If you are working through the network by difficulty rather than theme, this is the order.
| Room | Venue | Players | Difficulty | Scare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Da Vinci Down Under | Chadstone | 2 to 4 | 5 / 5 | Not scary |
| Mission:Possible | Chadstone | 2 to 4 | 5 / 5 | Not scary |
| Secret Agent Man | South Yarra | 2 to 6 | 4 / 5 | Not scary |
| Strangest Thing | Hawthorn | 2 to 6 | 4 / 5 | Spooky |
| Game of the Dragon | South Yarra | 2 to 6 | 4 / 5 | Not scary |
| The Conjoining | St Kilda | 2 to 6 | 4 / 5 | Terrifying |
The other room at Chadstone is HackSaw: Remastered, our trap horror rebuild, four out of five and rated Terrifying.
Finding us in Chadstone
Da Vinci Down Under is one of three escape rooms at Rush Chadstone, 53 Warrigal Road in Oakleigh, minutes from Chadstone Shopping Centre and a short walk from Oakleigh Station. Easy from Malvern East, Carnegie, Murrumbeena, Hughesdale, Clayton, Mount Waverley, Glen Waverley, Bentleigh, Springvale and the south east, with parking on site.
Chadstone is the venue we point serious players at. Two of its three rooms are the hardest we run, and Oakleigh's Eaton Mall is five minutes away for the post-mortem, which after this room is usually required.
Sessions run seven days. Two to four players, sixty minutes, instant confirmation and free rescheduling up to two hours before your start time.