Revelation Puzzle Rooms' escape room where you cure a virus

Revelation Puzzle Rooms in Fyshwick has designed various escape rooms that all revolve around a storyline focusing on the fictional virus, Valerium.

Understandably, Revelation cofounder and game designer Daniel Douglas still finds the similarities the two-year-old escape room's storyline has with reality a bit surreal.

"It's a bit strange, isn't it? I guess we've never really considered that this could happen when we started a couple of years ago," he said.

"This is one of the common storylines people go with when designing escape rooms and there wasn't a virus theme in Canberra at that stage, so we thought it'd be quite popular. Then coming forward to now, it's definitely not something I expected to become reality at all."

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An escape room is a game that sees players discover clues and solve puzzles to achieve a specific goal in a limited time.

On Monday, the business will open its latest virus-theme room, Doomsday, which transforms players into fast-thinking covert operatives who must work against the clock to neutralise the source of the virus.

Revelation Puzzle Rooms also has a room where people can track down the person who created the virus and another, titled Toxic, which challenges players to create a cure for the virus.

Douglas is hoping that Doomsday will be just as popular as what the other rooms have been since Revelation reopened in June, following lockdown.

"We were a little worried reopening that no one would want to come back because of how our story revolves around this virus, but we were so thankful to see that people were, in fact, more engaged with it after experiencing it themselves," he said.

"We have found that groups that have come have a couple of different reactions to the rooms. Either they're coming because of how real the virus story is and they want to experience it and have control this time, which is definitely very cathartic. The others come for the black comedy aspect. There is enjoyment because it's so real."

It's relatively unusual for an escape room to connect its storylines so heavily.

While other escape rooms may have Easter eggs referencing another of the themed puzzle, they don't usually all follow the same storyline like they do at Revelation.

"The rooms are designed such that, the link is vague enough that you can play in any order, but if you're looking for the storyline it's really there," Douglas says.

"Some people don't care so much about the story but others really love it and they'll follow the little intricacies we've added in.

"There's a diary on our website as well that has one of the character's writings; his thought process at the very start of the virus. We have quite a deep story here that people love sometimes.

"But it can be quite difficult to tie rooms together like this. I think the reason the majority of people wouldn't go with it is because tying very different themes together can be quite difficult when you've got the narrative."