Fantasy escape rooms in Melbourne
Fantasy is the oldest storytelling mode there is and the most awkward one to put in a room, because the genre's signature move is scale. Kingdoms, journeys, armies. An escape room has sixty minutes and four walls, which appears to be the exact opposite of what fantasy wants.
The way through is to notice that the two most durable fantasy archetypes are not epics at all. One is a monster guarding a hoard in an enclosed space. The other is a person who falls into a world where the rules have changed and has to work out the new ones. Both are, structurally, rooms.
The hoard in the barrow
The dragon on its treasure predates almost everything else in the genre. It is in Beowulf, written down in Old English something over a thousand years ago, where the last act turns on a dragon coiled in a burial mound over gold that somebody hid there long before. A confined space, a guarded prize, and a person who has to go in.
That is a complete escape room brief in one sentence, and it is why the treasure-guarding dragon has survived a thousand years of retelling while most of the poem's other content has not. The archetype does something for a story that nothing else does: it makes greed and courage the same action.
Game of the Dragon
South Yarra · 2 to 6 players · Difficulty 4/5 · No fright rating · All agesA throne, a claim to it, and a great deal in the way. A four out of five, so it sits among the harder things we run, and it carries no fright element at all. That combination is rarer than it sounds and it is useful.
It has one of the largest capacities in the network, so it is the room to take when the point is keeping a bigger group together in one place rather than splitting them across several.
The world where the rules changed
The other archetype is the fall into somewhere that operates differently, and its best-known version was written by a mathematician.
Charles Dodgson, who published as Lewis Carroll, lectured in mathematics and wrote seriously on logic. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland came out in 1865 and reads as nonsense, but it is nonsense built by somebody who thought professionally about how arguments work. The Wonderland characters do not talk gibberish. They apply real logical forms to false premises, follow them rigorously, and arrive somewhere absurd. That is a very specific kind of joke and only a logician makes it.
It is also, unexpectedly, a design brief. A room built on Wonderland logic can present a rule that is internally consistent and completely unlike the one you walked in with, and a group that keeps applying its old assumptions will get nowhere while a group that accepts the new rule will move quickly.
Alice in Wonderland
St Kilda · 2 to 6 players · Difficulty 3/5 · Spooky · All agesA darker reading of Wonderland than the one most people carry, and one of the best-looking rooms we have built. Rated three out of five for difficulty and spooky rather than scary, which most children enjoy and a small number do not.
The spooky rating is worth taking at face value. It is strange rather than frightening, and there is nothing in it built to make anybody jump.
Why fantasy rooms tend to be the prettiest
A realistic setting is judged against the real thing. An office has to look like an office, and every departure from that is a mistake somebody notices. A fantasy setting is judged only against itself, which frees the build in a way that shows.
That is why our two fantasy rooms carry some of the most involved set construction in the network. When there is no reference photograph to match, the constraint stops being accuracy and becomes coherence, and coherence is a more interesting thing to build toward.
Choosing between the two
Take Game of the Dragon if the group is larger, wants a proper challenge, and contains anybody who does not want atmosphere of any kind. Four out of five, no fright.
Take Alice in Wonderland if the group is smaller or newer, or if the appeal is the look of the thing as much as the solving. Three out of five, spooky.
They are also at different venues, South Yarra and St Kilda, so geography may decide it before anything else does.
Questions
Is spooky the same as scary?
No, and we rate them apart deliberately. Spooky means odd and atmospheric. Our scary rooms are a separate tier with an age restriction, all published on the scare scale.
Do children enjoy these?
Both are all ages. Game of the Dragon is the harder of the two, so for a younger group it is worth having adults ready to take the reasoning. Rooms for kids and families covers how that works in practice.
Only two fantasy rooms?
Two, and we would rather be accurate about it. Broader adventure without horror is on adventure escape rooms.
Do we need to know the stories?
No. Both rooms teach you everything they need you to know inside the hour, and nothing depends on having read anything beforehand.
Game of the Dragon Alice in Wonderland
Two rooms is a small category. If the appetite is for a world rather than specifically this one, the other themes cover considerably more ground.