Red Herring Escape Rooms Crown Melbourne

Did the alien escape room. Was quite different to ones I've done in the past as you had to use clues from your first room for the remainder of the challenge. Additionally, we were only given three phone calls or three hints which made it harder. We still got out in an hour and had a great time. Also got a drink voucher for 2. Would definitely go again.

One of the best escape rooms we’ve done! We had booked both the alien rooms but due to tech issues one of our groups were placed in shutdown. The staff were great, they understood the frustrations of not having identical rooms being a competition between us but that didn’t take anything away from our experience. We’re back in March for a re-do with our team and are super excited to do the opposite rooms! Thanks to the staff working on 20/01/24!

Went with my partner in July and again in October. Staff were super friendly and happy to help, helping us to get reservations at other establishments whilst we waited for our booking. Drinks provided were delicious and the cute little puzzles in the lobby were a great touch! The escape room itself was immersive. We found that the easier room was more scaled to a group of two, as we didn't escape the harder room! Still had a great time though. We will be returning again!

Didn’t overly enjoy this escape room, compared to others. The fact that it solves clues for you to every 10 mins is annoying and you don’t know which clues you have solved or not.

Enjoyed the haunted escape room. The staff was helpful and did a good safety briefing. They helped when we were inside the room. A fun experience with a complimentary drink afterwards.

Dylan was a legend.
A balance between musical, technical and poetic knowledge. Although not absolutely necessary it did help, some slight automatic hints along the way kept us flowing but still maintained a challenge.

V was amazing. Thanks for your excellent customer service. We really enjoyed. I loved your accent!

This was my first ever escape room, and it was a very enjoyable experience! The rooms are very well produced and are immersive. The staff were very nice, Dylan was very helpful with any questions we had.

Staff were thorough with room explanations, having the rooms computer monitored is a great set-up. Should be used in more escape room establishments

Never again, biggest waste of $200. The desk people don’t answer the phones to assist with clues, one of the quizzes were broken which used up all our time trying to figure it out to only find out once our time ran out “oh yeah that hasnt been working all day” Employees were not helpful at all, NEVER again coming here!

Pretty generic rooms that are also used at multiple other venues in Melbourne, if you are an escape room enthusiast probably give this one a miss.

Staff were great though.

We did the Alien room. The physical aesthetics of the room were nice. However, the customer service at this escape room has been the worst that I’ve experienced at any escape room before. Normally, you’ll have one game master dedicated to your room, who watches your every move and knows exactly what is going on. However, as we arrived for our room, we were briefed with another group and then it didn’t feel like they were even watching what we were doing. The rooms had timers on the puzzles, where if you hadn’t done a puzzle by a certain time, the AI would give you a hint, but these hints would often be things that we had already done, and would not really add to the experience. They don’t seem to offer you overtime either, luckily for us, we completed their hardest room with 10 minutes remaining.

The lady came in at the end exclaiming that she’d never seen anyone escape the room we had gotten out of, and said in recognition of how well we had done, she was happy to give us vouchers to do another one of their rooms for free in the coming days, so we showed up the next day to take her up on the offer we’d been given. However, once we got there, we were told by the man at the store that he couldn’t do what the lady had told us. He said he could get us the rooms for a buy one get one free. We’re not from Melbourne, we came from Canberra and came to check out Melbourne’s escape rooms as a part of our trip. We cancelled a part of our plans to take them up on their offer, and in the end essentially got baited in to do another escape room where we would still have to pay. We had spent an hour to get to the location, so it was quite pointless just leaving, so we ended up paying for the escape room. To add to this, the escape rooms at this location are $50 per person, by far the most expensive that I’ve ever paid, and I’ve done over 10 escape rooms before.

It was quite a shame to see such a lack of devotion to their customers. One person should not be running multiple rooms, and juggling around customers inside the store on their own. Such a heavy reliance on technology also comes with a downside of a simulated feeling, rather than a traditional games feeling. Won’t be coming back here again: (

My friends and I decided to try an escape room while on holiday in Melbourne. We decided to try the ‘Shutdown’ escape room and oh my was it awesome (IRIS was kinda scary but in a good way). Not just the escape room but also the staff member who got us going. I didn’t catch your name but the tallish dude with glasses, you rock! And so does Red Herring Escape Rooms. Definitely give this place a go!

We tried Old Haunt as our first intro into escape rooms - amazing experience, the two of us managed to finish with several minutes spare, thanks to the AI of these rooms. Great fun, very atmospheric, great experience! Wish we had time to try more.

Excellent customer service and commitment to delivering a unique experience. Thank you to Michael for your extremely friendly and thorough supervision of the two rooms we completed.

The escape rooms were super interactive and fun and the staff were lovely, especially Bug — they were so friendly, helpful and accomodating!

TLDR: Red Herring relies heavily on gimmicky AI functions and faulty puzzles. No overtime is provided (or offered for a fee) if you do not finish in an hour, and the price is above average for escape rooms in this area. Worth trying somewhere else for sure.

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To start off; my friend and I who came to Red Herring are escape room aficionados and have done at least twenty escape rooms. We usually finish rooms within forty minutes or so with very little need for hints, so we were pretty confident. Somehow, Red Herring might be one of the worst I've been to. We're from out of state, so we wanted to experience the best of Melbourne's escape rooms and booked in at $54 pp at Red Herring for Old Haunt. Aesthetically, Red Herring hits all the marks as we were wow'd by the décor as we came in. Unfortunately, that's about where it stops.

We arrived fifteen minutes early for our game as the email requests, but the previous group was running late so the guy working there gave us free drink vouchers for next door. That was fine and we had no issue with that, so we went over there for fifteen minutes as requested and came back afterwards. We then waited about another twenty or so minutes in the lobby before another staff member approached us and started us up with some warm-up puzzles. I like the ideas of these puzzles, but honestly think there could be better and more related puzzles to the room, rather than rearranging poker chips but that's just me nit-picking.

Finally our room is ready, and the staff member was very good at explaining the story to us. Unfortunately, we were not offered a locker so had to do our escape room with backpacks on and our phones in our pockets.

Red Herring proudly boasts an AI driven escape room, so we were excited to see the execution. Some parts were clever, like flashing lights to guide us to the right part of the room, but other parts were just frustrating - for example, the room would automatically skip a puzzle if you'd spent too long on it but there was no indication that this had happened, so there's a chance you might spend way too long on something that's already been solved. It also affects the linearity of the room.

Some puzzles weren't fantastic and were very gimmicky; for instance there's one puzzle which relies on having very able-bodied participants, so anyone with any mobility issues would definitely struggle here and have to wait until the room decides to solve it for you. We had one puzzle that was faulty and we spent probably about 15 minutes trying to solve it before spending several minutes waiting for one of the staff to answer the phone. The staff member ended up having to come in and checked the puzzle himself and tried to retrieve the keys for us but deduced he couldn't after a few minutes and manually triggered the next puzzle. However, the clock was still ticking down and we'd now lost probably about 20 minutes to these keys alone and when mentioning this the staff member only apologised and left the room.

Don't get me wrong - it's not his fault, but it's a shame that we couldn't get much further into the room due to losing almost half of our time. Overtime would have been extremely helpful and would have probably seen us through to the end, but we ended up finishing the room feeling very disappointed and like we'd wasted our money.

The staff member was very apologetic and offered us more free drink vouchers which was nice, but we ended up throwing them out as they weren't really of any use to us. All in all, Red Herring is an extremely disappointing and subpar escape room (though the staff are lovely), and is too heavily reliant on faulty gimmicks. Had the room not had any AI features and was instead reliant on a game master, it's very likely we would've enjoyed ourselves more.

There are far better ways to spend $108 and I very much wish we hadn't wasted our money here.

Super super awesome! The story was laid out really well, we were given brainteasers before we went in and because we had to start half an hour late they gave us drink cards which was really considerate as well! Definitely going to go back again

So welcoming! Had a late night session and Thomas was incredible, so welcoming I will definitely come back soon

We had so much fun working out how to conquer the escape room at crown. We will definitely be going back to give the other 2 escapes room a go. The host was fantastic, she even gave us puzzles to solve whilst we waited to enter the room. A really fun night night:)