The best online and at-home Australian escape rooms

Bring the fun of an escape room into your home with 'A Most Mysterious Convention,' an at-home escape room package by Brisbane company Arcadium Adventures. After you place your order online, a mysterious manila envelope sealed with wax will arrive on your doorstep. Inside, you’ll find materials from the Annual Mystery Convention known as ArcanaCon including instructions on how to uncover a secret message. For those who don't like waiting for the mail to arrive, the escape room is also available for instant download online.

Experios has got you covered with options for two to six players and different levels of difficulty to choose from. Start off with the beginners escape room 'Time's Ticking Jr', a classic detective game designed to be suitable for teenagers, too. Then ramp up your challenge with a trip to bank robbing fantasy land with 'Ben's Big Heist', a money-grabbing, code-cracking puzzler. And if you consider yourself and your crew escape room experts, try 'Jack's Hangover', Experios' most challenging room that has you tracing a central character's post-big night room for clues and racing to the airport.

'Bad Altitude' probably belongs more in the category of story-based online video games than actual escape rooms. But let's not quibble. The setup is this: you are with some number of friends, either clustered together around one computer screen, using different screens in the same room or in different locations and linked via Google Hangouts, Zoom or any other video chat platform of your choosing. Your mission is to solve problems aboard a commercial flight, from overly sensitive passengers to lost luggage to, as you might expect, landing the whole damn plane. There is no human on the other end in real-time, but several different cartoon characters help or hinder you on your quest. Your primary contact is the flight attendant on board, a very friendly but slightly inept Welshman named Rhys. 

When auditoriums sat empty during lockdown restrictions, the Sydney Opera House team got busy developing a virtual escape room designed to transport you into the hidden labyrinth of backstage rooms underneath the venue – without you ever leaving your home. 'The Trials of Wisdom' is a free online game that engages your problem-solving skills to solve riddles and puzzles in order to free yourself. Taking inspiration from Mozart’s fantastical opera The Magic Flute, this game has plenty of hidden Easter eggs to tickle the interests of classical music aficionados and theatrical fanatics, but prior knowledge is not a prerequisite to give these puzzles a crack, which involves decoding ballerinas’ dance positions and deciphering meaning from the ramblings of a frustrated orchestra player.