Escapade NZ — Attraction in Waitematā

In April, my sister and I played all five rooms and had a blast... here are the detailed reviews:

We felt well looked after at The Kiwi Escape Game: Escapade NZ. All rooms were beautifully decorated and matched the respective theme very well. The game masters were friendly and helpful and provided the right level of support and hints only when requested. A nice lounge area as well as a bar and toilets are available. The room "Old School" exists twice and you can play against each other in teams.

The Bach: A fun room with linear riddles and much to do. It's the exact right mixture between searching for clues and solving riddles. We very much enjoyed this lovely Kiwi themed room which had a really nice flow to it.

The Shed: This room was apparently designed by Australian psychologists, and let's say, we didn't quite get their logic... We got a bit frustrated because some of the riddles didn't seem logical to us, but nevertheless the riddles were quite innovative and provided us with a nice challenge.

The Tavern: A nice mystical themed room which reminded us quite a bit of "Das Wirtshaus" (Countdown Landsberg) when it came to decorations and theme. We had a nice flow when solving the riddles - some of them quite innovative and different to what we had seen so far - and very much enjoyed our time in the tavern.

The Boathouse: This room was initially set up outdoors in the Auckland harbour and Escapade NZ did a wonderful job transferring the riddles to an indoor escape room. The riddles were mostly linear and some were quite challanging. And just one more thing: We hope you don't mind crawling into small spaces...

Old School: We all remember school fondly, but tests and exams weren't that much fun. Well, here they are... the riddles all relate to school subjects and can be solved in parallel. But just like in school, the naughty kids have to go to detention, so be aware of skipping exams or not studying...

Great experience: unique puzzles + friendly staff!

I was playing solo, and Jemma & Tamrin were extremely helpful in explaining which rooms would be best for a solo player, as well as working out some trickiness with booking times :) One of the rooms did require a partner for one puzzle, but Claire (another awesome staff member) jumped in to help me out.

Overall, the rooms are all well-designed and moderately difficult, with some fun themes & really unique puzzles. Highly recommended for all experience levels!

If your group has a decent amount of experience, I’d probably recommend a smaller group (4 or fewer), since most of the rooms were relatively linear (only 1 puzzle can be worked on at a time). Larger groups would probably be best in The Bach or Old School (where puzzles could be done in parallel much of the time).

The Tavern + Galactic Cantina are the most “3rd gen” escape rooms here — relying heavily on the theme + lots of electronic/mechanical puzzles + some truly unique puzzles (and I've done a LOT of escape rooms) — definitely my favorites!

The Bach + Old School are a little more traditional — though still very fun / well-themed. (I preferred The Bach of these two, and either would be great for beginners.)

The Boathouse sits somewhere in-between the two groups above, and was especially “hands-on”.

Without giving too much away, there are some interesting tactile puzzles across nearly every one of the rooms — involving the use of liquid, lights, magnets, hardware tools, etc.

Some small negatives — across the entire set of rooms, there were: Two puzzles that required some (very basic) knowledge that likely anyone from NZ would have, but I didn’t Two puzzles that might be difficult (impossible?) for someone with certain colorblindness Never more than 2 sub-rooms within a given room — but this actually wasn’t a big drawback (there was plenty to do!), and my favorites were actually...

This was the first escape room I ever did in my life so I had no idea what to expect. We were locked in the room and I was tingling with excitement. Would it be hard? Would it be easy? Most importantly, would it be fun? The answer to the last question is a definite yes. We came as a group of four and all had times where we contributed giving a sense of usefulness to everyone. The escape room also had an interesting story that I was invested in 🤣 The only thing that went wrong is that at one point (trying not to spoil) something broke and we didn’t know if it was part of it or not. It wasn’t. But the staff were really nice and fixed it later and said it happened sometimes. Also just saying it wasn’t our fault, it just happened. 😭 So we went to the bach escape room so I can only speak for that one but I would definitely recommend going there because you’ll have an amazing time. And DON’T go alone. It’s the worst thing you can do. If you go no one then find someone random on the street and do it with them. More people makes it so...