Room Escape Artist

Vive la résistance!

Location: Sydney, Australia

Date Played: March 13, 2024

Team Size: 2-8; we recommend 3-4

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: $60 AUD per player for 2-3 players, $57 AUD per player for 4-8 players

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: Fully accessible

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

As I opened my eyes in La Rébellion, my gaze was instantly pulled upwards. Quaint metal-fenced balconies lined the upper floor of a tall, airy European courtyard. With The Cipher Room’s second location in St. Peters came high ceilings, and they utilized this extra space to the utmost. It was striking.

Furthermore, the environment felt thoroughly cinematic in both color and texture. Whereas The Cipher Room’s The Marlowe Hotel was more overtly otherworldly, placing players in a fully grayscale film noir world, La Rébellion was perhaps its sepia-centric cousin. There was a magical simplicity in The Cipher Room’s approach to lighting, somehow setting the mood, spotlighting important features, and enhancing the right colors, all using carefully chosen off-the-shelf fixtures.

La Rébellion also featured the most creative gameplay yet from The Cipher Room. Each puzzle was clean, satisfying, and distinctive, with some phenomenally layered sequences and sneakily situated environmental ahas. Everything clicked into place, metaphorically and often literally. I was particularly delighted by the manipulations and transformations of certain organic and domestic details.

Even though La Rébellion did not actually reference any specific real historical events, the story was clearly situated in a mildly dystopian French past. This lens worked, though there was room to push the details of this alternate reality even further. Generally speaking, I’d love to see more of the “historical thriller” genre explored in escape rooms, whether real, imagined, or anywhere in between. The world presented in La Rébellion was a refreshing departure from more standard escape room themes.

The Cipher Room began with creative and original takes on the traditional escape room formula, and while their newest showstoppers in St. Peters — La Rébellion and Mr Pepper’s Toy Shop — continue to be rooted in this style, they are so much more, with world-class set design and a flair for the dramatic.

Who is this for?

• Scenery snobs
• Puzzle lovers
• Best for players with at least some experience

Why play?

• Gorgeous cinematic set design
• Creative environmentally-situated gameplay
• A jaw-dropping finale

Story

As members of the French resistance, we attempted to infiltrate a secret bunker belonging to an evil leader. We had intel that inside was some intelligence that could bring down the regime.

Setting

La Rébellion took place in a walled French courtyard, just outside an evil leader’s hideout. The space was tall, narrow, and detailed. Every surface was carefully textured, landing somewhere on the spectrum from vivid reality to a dramatic painting.

Gameplay

The Cipher Room’s La Rébellion was a standard escape room with a moderate-to-high level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around solving puzzles and making connections.

Analysis

➕ La Rébellion‘s set design was breathtaking. The perfect blend of texture, detail, and lighting produced a sort of real-life “color grading” which made us feel as if we were in a historical film. A clever division of space and use of height made a moderately-sized room feel like a spacious outdoor courtyard. Every surface we examined and prop we interacted with was instantly transportive.

➕ The Cipher Room’s innovations extended into the realm of safety. For La Rébellion, as well as some of their other rooms, they devised an utterly brilliant mechanism to give the illusion that we were locked in without actually locking the door. Furthermore, they enhanced an in-room van with some admirable safety features, ensuring that the vehicle was securely anchored, that players couldn’t crawl underneath, and that doors and windows couldn’t fully close on any prying fingers — all while disguising these properties and keeping the van looking as normal as possible. It is rare to see an escape room company go to such great lengths to ensure player safety while equally maintaining their full artistic integrity.

➕ The gameplay was smooth and satisfying, naturally emerging from the environment. Every small detail was meaningful and intentional, and The Cipher Room paid careful attention to avoid red herrings.

➕ La Rébellion didn’t feel like a high-tech room, though there was plenty of well-concealed technological magic where it mattered. Moreover, a number of delightfully low-tech mechanical interactions made the setting feel dynamic and lived-in.

➕ Certain interactions expanded our sense of the world as extending beyond the sliver we directly inhabited.

➕ In such a tall space, there’s always a risk of puzzles and interactions feeling small or disconnected. La Rébellion wholly avoided this by designing the decor — low and high, small and large — around the puzzles. This style of design also prompted some phenomenal environmental ahas.

➕ As the game progressed, the puzzles became increasingly layered, often requiring more collaboration and communication. There was a satisfying narrative shape to this flow.

➖/➕ A counting puzzle felt relatively uninspired compared to the other puzzles in La Rébellion, though a player-friendly implementation and an unusual framing mechanic still kept things interesting.

➕ A jaw-dropping finale was both narratively impactful and technically impressive. Whereas many elements in The Cipher Room’s experiences have organically evolved, their ability to pull off ambitious, dramatic wow moments has absolutely skyrocketed.

➖ While our narrative objective was clear at the onset and resolved by the end, most of the gameplay was thematic without serving any deeper story function. I can’t fault such thoughtful and deeply fun gameplay, yet as The Cipher Room continues to mature, I’d love to see them design more story beats and incremental character development directly into their gameplay.

Tips For Visiting

• La Rébellion is located at the St. Peters location of The Cipher Room.

Book your hour with The Cipher Room’s La Rébellion, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: The Cipher Room comped our tickets for this game.