Sealing yourself in a coffin is just one of the traumas awaiting participants of the Adventure Room’s horror-themed escape room. That’s the only clue you’re getting before you face demented dummies, flickering lights, a box full of spiders, and haunted photographs.

Adventure Rooms Adelaide is located directly across Rundle Mall from JB Hi Fi. It’s easy to miss the elevator entrance that takes you up to their multi-floor venue. The Abandoned Cabin is their only entry into this year’s Adelaide Fringe, although their other rooms remain available to book directly through the venue, now and throughout the year.

Hello. My name is Rod. And I’m an Adventure Room junkie, but this is the first horror-themed game I’ve encountered. I jumped. I may have sworn a few times too. See that freaky image at the top of this review? Yeah, you’ll meet her as she crawls out of a television, although there are no live actors in the room [insert profanity here]. You’ll have to experience it to understand. This is not one for children.

The Abandoned Cabin is rated 5/5 for difficulty, although that depends on your experience and the team of friends you put together. Win or lose, it is perhaps the best realised escape room around. Visually, it is stunning. The scenery, sound effects, props, and an eerie child singing all add up to a rather tense session that races against the clock and gets the heart pumping.

The premise is that you have sought shelter in an isolated cabin during a thunderstorm, but it may not be as deserted as you think. Watch out for skeletons, hooded figures, demented clowns, bats and decapitated heads. No, Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore.

The puzzles are, as expected, clever, and require team work to solve. They vary from the simple to the impossibly hard but, as always, there’s a game master on hand to throw you a clue if you get too stuck. The impetus to escape the haunted cabin should be all the motivation you need, because when the lights start to flicker and dim…

I hope you believe in Heaven.