Things to Do in Melbourne: Escape Rooms
Melbourne is spoiled for things to do, and escape rooms are one of the city's most highly rated activities. We run 16 individually designed rooms across four venues, rated 4.9 from more than 2,700 reviews, for couples, families, friends and work teams.
★★★★★ 4.9 on Google from 2,700+ reviews across our four Melbourne venues.
What is an escape room?
You and your group are locked into a themed room, well, not really locked, and have 60 minutes to work through a chain of clues, codes and hidden mechanisms to complete the story and get out. There are no screens, no experience needed and a game master watching to help if you stall. It rewards teamwork, curiosity and lateral thinking, and it is as good for a first date as it is for a company offsite.
Every one of our rooms is designed and built in-house, so you will not find them anywhere else. They range from all-ages adventures to genuinely terrifying horror, with the scare level clearly marked on each.
A taste of the 16 rooms
A cross-section, from family-friendly to our scariest:
- The Nine-Nine (Hawthorn) — a comedic Brooklyn detective heist, all-ages and a favourite for younger kids
- Da Vinci Down Under (Chadstone) — crack da Vinci's lost inventions, one of our two hardest rooms
- The Last of Them (St Kilda) — survive the infected, an intense post-apocalyptic escape for teens and up
- It's Nightmare (South Yarra) — a Pennywise-style nightmare, genuinely terrifying (16+)
- Secret Agent Man (South Yarra) — playful and clever if horror is not your thing
Melbourne-wide, near you
With venues in South Yarra, Hawthorn, St Kilda and Chadstone, there is a Rush close to most of Melbourne, and we have local guides for dozens of suburbs. Pick the one nearest you.
Best escape rooms in Melbourne → Escape rooms for groups →Book at any of our four venues
We have 16 rooms across four Melbourne venues, so there is usually one close to you. South Yarra is our six-room flagship; Hawthorn is home to the original HackSaw; St Kilda has our most advanced sets and effects; and Chadstone (Oakleigh) holds our two hardest puzzle rooms. Pick your nearest and check live times.
Frequently asked questions
- What is there to do at Rush?
- Sixteen individually designed escape rooms across four Melbourne venues, from all-ages adventures to horror, each a 60-minute game for 2 to 6 players.
- Is it suitable for beginners?
- Completely, most players are first-timers. A game master briefs you and helps if you get stuck.
- How much does it cost?
- Standard pricing runs $70 to $74 a player, with Crew Night and Cheap Tuesday deals. See prices and deals.
- Where are you?
- South Yarra, Hawthorn, St Kilda and Chadstone (Oakleigh), with local guides for many suburbs in between.
Browse by interest
Find the right room or occasion.
Two hours, a group, and a city with too many options
Melbourne is not short of ways to spend an afternoon. Galleries, laneways, the sport, the food, the coast, comedy in a basement somewhere. The difficulty is rarely finding something. It is finding something that works for the particular four or five people standing in front of you.
That is the question this page is actually about. Not what there is to do here, which is endless, but what a group should pick when the group does not agree on much.
The thing most Melbourne plans have in common
Look at how a group spends the time in each of the usual options and a pattern shows up quickly.
At the cinema you sit in a row in the dark and are asked not to talk to each other for two hours. At a gallery you drift apart within ten minutes and meet again at the exit. At the football you are all facing the same direction watching other people do something. At a bar you talk, which is fine if the group already knows what to talk about, and quietly awful if it does not.
All of those are good. But in every one of them, the group is in the same place at the same time doing something individually, in parallel. The night is enjoyable in proportion to how well everyone already gets on.
An escape room inverts that. The hour cannot be done in parallel. It has a shared objective, it needs the quiet person to say the thing they noticed, and it produces a result that belongs to all of you rather than an opinion each of you formed separately. That is the reason it works for groups that would struggle with an unstructured evening, and it is the only real argument for it over everything else on the list.
Who this actually solves a problem for
Groups with nothing in common
The classic hard caseMixed ages, mixed interests, a partner's friends, a family with a twenty-year spread in it. Nobody needs to know anything beforehand and nobody has an advantage, so the usual hierarchy of who knows about what does not apply.
People who are not drinking
An evening that is not built on a barA surprising amount of adult social life in this city routes through alcohol. This is a night out that has a point of its own and does not need one.
Visitors with one free afternoon
Something you cannot do at homeEvery room here was designed and built in house, so these are not franchised sets that also exist in your own city. You will not have played them anywhere else.
Groups that have run out of conversation
New teams, in-laws, teenagersAn hour with a task in it does more for a group than three hours of making conversation, and it gives everyone something to talk about afterwards that is not the weather or work.
It suits people who want to participate. If what someone wants is to be entertained without doing anything, this is the wrong choice and there is no point pretending otherwise. No physical fitness is involved, and nobody has to be clever in any way they would recognise as clever.
Sixteen rooms, and how to choose without knowing anything
Everything we run is judged on three things, and once you have your answer to each of them the shortlist is usually two or three rooms rather than sixteen.
- How frightening do you want it? Most of our rooms are not frightening at all. They are heists, adventures, mysteries and puzzle-boxes. A handful are built to genuinely scare you, and we publish where every single room sits on a four-tier scare scale so nobody is surprised at the door.
- How hard do you want it? Difficulty is rated separately from fear, because they are not the same thing and a lot of operators blur them. Some of our gentlest rooms are among the hardest to finish.
- How many of you are there? Rooms take two to six. Two people can complete any of them. Six people in the right room is the loudest hour of the year.
Two things are worth stating plainly because they get assumed the wrong way round. There are no live actors in any of our sixteen rooms, at any venue, at any time of year, including Halloween. Nothing in a room is a person waiting to grab you. And gore runs on its own axis: HackSaw and HackSaw: Remastered are the visceral ones, while The Conjoining and It's Nightmare are at the top of the fear scale with none of it.
Room by room, with the reasoning, sits on the best escape rooms in Melbourne, which also names the six other Melbourne operators we would send you to.
Where the four venues sit, if you do not know Melbourne
We are in four parts of the city, none of them in the CBD itself, all of them a short trip from it.
South Yarra, closest to the city
Six rooms at 160 Toorak Road, with the entrance around the corner at 147 Osborne Street. Roughly five minutes on the train from Flinders Street, then a two-minute walk. It sits between the Royal Botanic Gardens, the MCG and Melbourne Park, so this is the one to choose if you are staying in the city and want the rest of the day within walking distance.
Hawthorn, the inner east
Three rooms at 606 Glenferrie Road, including the original HackSaw. The 16 tram stops outside at Stop 72 and Glenferrie Station is 150 metres away. Street parking on the surrounding blocks costs nothing, which makes it the easiest of the four to drive to.
St Kilda, on the bay
Four rooms on the first floor of 100 Barkly Street, a few minutes from Luna Park, Acland Street and the foreshore. The widest range of rooms in one building, from all-ages through to our most advanced sets and effects. Choose this one if you want the beach in the same trip.
Chadstone, the south east
Our newest venue, on Warrigal Road in Oakleigh at number 53. Parking is on site, which no other venue can offer, and Chadstone Shopping Centre is a few minutes away. Follow the map pin rather than the street number, because Warrigal Road carries more than one of them.
What it costs
Monday to Thursday, all day. $50 an adult with 3 or more playing, no code required.
Friday to Sunday and public holidays. $74 a player, dropping to $70 once there are six of you.
Under-16s play with a participating adult. A child aged 9 to 13 is $42.
The complete breakdown, every day and every group size, is on the prices and deals page.
Never done one before
Then read how escape rooms work before you book. It walks through the booking, the briefing, the hour and what to bring, and it answers the question everybody asks first, which is whether you are actually locked in. You are not.
Questions from people still deciding
We are not puzzle people. Is this really for us?
Almost nobody who walks in is a puzzle person. What the hour rewards is noticing things and saying them out loud, and the person who contributes most is very often the one who was most certain they would be useless.
We have one afternoon in Melbourne. Is this the best use of it?
If the group already agrees on what it wants, probably not, go and do that. If it does not agree, this is the plan least likely to leave somebody bored, and it takes about ninety minutes of the day rather than all of it.
Is it better with more people?
Different, not better. Two people talk through everything and miss less. Six people cover far more ground and get louder. Four is the number most groups enjoy most.
We did one overseas. Is this the same thing?
Same idea, different execution. Ours are built here rather than bought as a kit, so the sets, mechanisms and stories are unique to these four venues, and the range runs wider than most single-site operators can offer.
Which one should a first-timer pick?
Start somewhere in the middle of the scare scale and the middle of the difficulty range, at whichever venue is easiest for you to reach. Reaching the venue without stress matters more to the night than the specific room does.