Escape room in Dunsan-dong, Daejeon: Level 5 Martian at Cube Escape

I've gotten into escape rooms lately, so I went back to Cube Escape, the place where I failed an escape a year ago.

Where is Cube Escape Daejeon Dunsan, and where do you park?

Cube Escape Dunsan-jeom is on the 5th floor of the building right across from Dunsan Core Tower. There are lots of good restaurants and bars nearby, plus plenty to see, so it's a great stop on a Daejeon date course.

There's a basement parking lot — it's tight, but having parking at all makes visiting really convenient. The entrance is narrow so it's easy to miss that there's parking; it felt like only actual visitors park there.

What the escape room café looks like inside

Cube Escape Dunsan-jeom is decorated with a Halloween-style vibe. It seems fine for family visits, but felt better suited to coming with older elementary or middle-school-age kids, or with friends.

It's decorated in a way that feels really true to the theme.

There's even a creepy mannequin, and each waiting table has a puzzle, but I didn't feel like using my brain right from the start so I skipped solving them.

You can take photos if you use 2 or fewer hints. We're beginners, so we didn't hope for photos — our only goal was to escape!

There's a discount event running for cash payments instead of account transfers.

There are autographs from celebrities who visited too, though honestly I didn't recognize most of them, haha.

There's a cabinet for storing your belongings, and you can set the password right on the spot.

How many themes are there, and how hard are they?

Cube Escape in Daejeon has 6 themes. Difficulty ranges from 4 to 5, which is a bit on the higher side. That makes it a great place to visit and solve on a date!

A year ago, as a total beginner, I tried the Titanic theme and failed, so I was planning to try Cinderella, a Level 4 theme, again this time. But since I'd gained a bit more escape room experience over the year, I figured that if I was going to fail anyway, I might as well pick a theme I actually wanted to try. A lot of people seem to go for the Obsession theme. I was tempted by Catacomb too, but my husband wanted to do Mars, so we booked Mars.

You can book themes through the website. Right now there's a weekday happy hour from 12pm to 5pm where you can experience a theme for ₩15,000 per person.

Level 5 Martian theme: how a beginner couple escaped with 6 hints

Cube Escape's Mars theme is about escaping Mars. Right when we walked in, it felt a bit sparse and we didn't know where to start, so we used a hint from the very beginning.

Maybe because the difficulty was 5, some puzzles were surprisingly simple once we heard the hint, while others we would have kept struggling with forever without one. My husband and I used about 6 hints, I think. These felt like puzzles that experienced escape room-goers would solve easily, but for beginners with fewer than 10 visits, they were really tough. They weren't simple puzzles either — some required combining A and B together.

Probably because of the space theme, the cockpit set was designed to feel like the real thing, and it was more realistic and well-made than I expected, which made it easy to get immersed. It's a bit of a shame we couldn't take photos since we used so many hints, but hey, we escaped within the time limit, haha.

It was fun getting to solve puzzles and have a fun date with my husband after a long while. Next time I want to try the popular Obsession theme. I'd recommend Cube Escape as a date course escape room café in Dunsan-dong, Daejeon!

Address, hours and parking at a glance

• Address: 5F, 47 Daedeok-daero 185beon-gil, Seo-gu, Daejeon, Cube Escape
• Hours: Weekdays 12:00–23:55 / Sat, Sun, holidays 11:00–02:00
• Parking: Building parking available (tight)