Room Escape Artist

Earthrise One is one of the best escape rooms around Melbourne, Australia. Here are our recommendations for great escape rooms in the Melbourne area.

Access granted

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Date Played: September 7, 2024

Team Size: 2-6; we recommend 3-4

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: $89 AUD per player for teams of 2 up to $54 AUD per player for teams of 6

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: Some players must crawl

Emergency Exit Rating: [A] Push To Exit

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

Earthrise One transported us to a pristine space station hiding some dark secrets. This thoroughly immersive experience featured solid storytelling in an impressively customizable environment. Between adjusting lighting settings and patching audio cables, we experienced a satisfying level of agency in our surroundings even when not directly guided by the gameplay.

Created by a group of friends who’ve worked on a number of other escape room, LARP, and game projects locally, Earthrise One showed tremendous potential across many dimensions. The setting was cinematic, the writing was stellar, and the gameplay was creative and flowed smoothly. Yet through all this, I could tell that the creators had lofty ambitions that this experience wasn’t yet quite meeting, particularly when it came to narrative impact. Even though the core story was well communicated, we rarely had an active role in it. We encountered multiple well-developed characters, but I never felt any sort of emotional connection to them. Earthrise One is already very good; with some further refinement, it could become deeply memorable.

Between Earthrise One and the playable stories at Ukiyo, I was delighted to delve into this small pocket of narratively innovative experiences within Melbourne’s otherwise fairly conventional escape room scene. Earthrise One is not to be missed if you’re in the area, and I have a feeling that this young company is only just getting started.

Speaking of which, the team behind Earthrise One ran a Kickstarter for a brand new experience called Star Crew which promises to combine escape room and flight simulation elements into a branching immersive adventure. From their description, it sounds like this experience will especially appeal to players who enjoy both escape rooms and LARPs.

Who is this for?

• Story seekers
• Puzzle lovers
• Scenery snobs
• Sci-fi fans
• Any experience level

Why play?

• A compelling, customizable space station
• Creative, narrative-driven gameplay

Story

Our crew boarded the “Earthrise One” space station. We were tasked with repairing the station, and maybe solving a mystery while we were there.

Setting

Earthrise One took place on a futuristic space station. Large LED-ringed octagonal doorways felt like something straight out of Star Trek. The station’s central console was packed with all sorts of intriguing controls, and cleanly designed operations and research stations abounded.

Gameplay

Earthrise One was a standard escape room with a moderate level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around solving puzzles and making connections. Additionally, the station offered opportunities for fun customization through its lighting and more.

Analysis

➕ Earthrise One beamed us onto a truly lovely space station. The design was sleek, futuristic, and sturdy. From our first interactions onwards, we appreciated the many small ways in which we were given control of our surroundings.

➕ The space progressively opened up with impactful transitions.

➕/➖ The writing throughout Earthrise One was detailed and coherent. Our understanding of the situation progressively deepened through both narration and gameplay. And yet, lacking any active characters to interact with, it felt as though the designers told this story in the passive voice.

➖ Earthrise One‘s tone oscillated between serious, dramatic, and funny. We enjoyed the moments of humor, but they didn’t always emerge organically from the gameplay.

➕/❓ We enjoyed interacting with a magical machine which rooted us in a futuristic reality. While it already prompted some level of play, there was an opportunity to even further replace the mundane with more elements of environmental customization.

➕ An unconventional hint system fit the world. It took some time for our team to efficiently disseminate this communication format, but we rolled with it.

➖/➕ We were presented with a crucial decision which was too big to truly feel meaningful. The interface through which to input this decision was tactile and exciting. While we had a hard time connecting with the stakes of this big decision, we loved the way in which the implications of many of our smaller decisions and actions were presented.

❓ I played Earthrise One and Ukiyo’s Deep Space saga on the same day. While both were narrative-centric sci-fi space games with some surface-level similarity, they each took the theme in impressively different directions. Deep Space focused on moral decisions, narrative branching, and character interaction, while Earthrise One featured a flashier space, a more layered mystery to unravel, and a higher density of active gameplay. My team was split on which experience they preferred. In a way, the weaknesses of one were the strengths of the other, and vice versa, thus complementing each other quite well.

Tips For Visiting

• Street parking was available nearby.
• There are some mild spooky elements, but this is not a scary game.

Book your hour with Earthrise One, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.