You wake in total darkness inside a rough wooden box, the last thing you heard was dirt hitting the lid. The Undertaker has buried you and your partner in separate coffins, and you have one hour to claw your way out.
In short: Buried Alive begins in total darkness: you and your partner have each been nailed into a coffin by the Undertaker. Sixty minutes, two boxes and one sadistic game that needs both of you to win.
Nobody remembers lying down. There was a voice, a shovel, the thud of earth landing on wood, and then nothing until now.
Now there is a coffin: two metres long, seventy centimetres wide, half a metre deep. Rough timber on every side, and above it, six feet of dirt.
This is the Undertaker’s handiwork. He has buried two people tonight, one to a box, and wired the graves together with a game only the pair of you can finish.
Neither of you can do it alone. Whatever one coffin hides, the other one needs.
Sixty minutes. After that, the boxes stop being a puzzle and become what they were built to be.
Six feet under. Sixty minutes to climb out.
Buried Alive is not a room you walk around. You lie in a timber coffin, often in pitch black, solving the Undertaker’s puzzles by touch, light and your partner’s voice, while the other half of the answer sits in the next box.
Stills from Buried Alive’s official banner film.
Escape This built Buried Alive around a single brutal idea: the room is the coffin. Each box is two metres of timber fitted with locks, hinges, hatches and hidden mechanisms, and it opened first at Escape This Northbridge before a second pair of coffins went into Sydney CBD.
Every burial is watched on CCTV and every coffin has a panic button, so the fear stays theatrical. The sequel, Asylum, carries the nightmare on for pairs who make it out.
Dress to lie down and wriggle: trousers or leggings, nothing loose or long. Skirts and dresses are a poor choice for a coffin, and so is anything you would mind getting dusty.
Buried Alive is a two-player horror escape room by Escape This. Each of you wakes in a separate wooden coffin, buried by a villain called the Undertaker, and the pair of you have 60 minutes to solve your way out. It is strictly 18+ and plays at Escape This Northbridge in Perth and Escape This Sydney CBD.
The Undertaker is the unseen villain of Buried Alive. He put you in the ground, his laugh is the last thing you remember hearing, and the coffins are the board for his latest sadistic game. You never need to face him; you need to beat him.
No. Buried Alive has two coffins and each one holds a single player, so you and your partner start the game apart. Players say that brief feeling of being on your own in the dark is the scariest part, and the puzzles only fall when both of you pull together.
Expect restraints. Reviewers describe their gamesmaster fitting blindfolds and handcuffs as Buried Alive begins, and the original Buried Alive site says both players are chained and locked inside their coffins. Every restraint is part of the puzzle, and the panic button is always within reach.
Yes: Asylum. Buried Alive’s original site names Asylum as its sequel, another extreme horror room that pushes further into madness. Asylum plays at both Buried Alive venues, Escape This Northbridge and Escape This Sydney CBD, so the two can be booked back to back.
Only in the nightmare it starts from. The 2010 film Buried follows one man alone in a coffin; Buried Alive puts two players in two coffins with an hour of puzzles, a gamesmaster on hints and a panic button. Its villain, the Undertaker, belongs to Escape This.
Taphophobia: the fear of being buried while still alive, which grew in the 18th and 19th centuries alongside inventions like the safety coffin. Buried Alive is built on exactly that dread. If the word describes you, this is the one Escape This room to skip.
Very. Escape This bills Buried Alive as Australia’s most extreme escape experience: you are sealed in a coffin in near-total darkness, with flashing light and jump scares possible. It is meant to frighten. If you are unsure whether you can handle it, Escape This’s own advice is not to play it.
For the right couple, yes. Escape This highly recommends Buried Alive for date nights, and its two-player format has made it a pick for anniversaries, Valentine’s Day and even proposals. Just be sure your date actually wants to spend an hour in a coffin first.
Experienced escapers who are relaxed about their own self-preservation. Escape This made Buried Alive for players who have tried everything else and want more, and its advice to anyone hesitating is simple: if you are unsure, don’t play.
Clothes you can lie down and wriggle in. Escape This recommends outfits suited to moving in an enclosed space for Buried Alive, and says skirts and dresses are not a good idea.
Escape This designed and built Buried Alive itself, coffins and all, and first opened it at Escape This Northbridge. Escape This is Australia’s largest escape room operator, with its own escape room design studio and escape room factory.
No. Horace is a separate, made-up character who tidies up after the Undertaker and has never seen him at work. The Undertaker, Buried Alive’s villain, keeps his own comic diary at theundertaker.com.au, where Asylum’s intercom voice and Cannibal’s Butcher are his alter egos. The two diaries refer to each other but share no text.
Book Buried Alive at Northbridge or Sydney CBD. Exactly two players, both 18 or over.
