Your names are already in the Keeper’s ledger. At midnight he throws the switch on the electric chair he calls Mercy, and your team has until then to get off the Row.
In short: In Death Row, Ironwood Penitentiary was ordered closed but its Keeper never left. He still keeps a ledger of the condemned and an electric chair he calls Mercy. Tonight your names are on his list, the generator is charging, and you have until midnight to find the way off the Row.
For most of a century Ironwood Penitentiary kept its worst inmates on a single corridor of cells at the back of the prison. The guards called it the Row. The inmates didn’t call it anything; they counted the days.
When the order came to close Ironwood, the cells were meant to be emptied and the execution chamber bricked up. The Row’s last executioner, a man the inmates only ever called the Keeper, filed the closure papers, sent the guards home and stayed behind with the keys.
He has been keeping the old timetable ever since. Names go into his ledger in neat copperplate, a date beside each one, and the date is always kept. He refuses to call what happens next an execution. To him the chair is Mercy, the last kindness a condemned prisoner will be shown.
The inmates never learned the Keeper’s real name, and they never would have guessed it. Beneath the warden’s cap is the Undertaker, the same patient villain who once nailed two strangers into coffins in Buried Alive, now trying on a new disguise and a new way of ending his games.
Tonight’s page carries your team’s names. Your cell doors have been unlocked for the customary last walk, and the generator behind the chamber door has begun to charge. You have until twelve.
Somewhere on the Row is the way out that the Keeper made sure nobody would find: in the cells, in the chaplain’s visiting room, in the ledger itself. Find it before the lights dim for the final time, or find out what Mercy feels like.
The date beside your name has always been kept. Make tonight the first time it isn’t.
Concept art imagining the Row at Ironwood Penitentiary. Death Row is still being built, so the finished sets may look quite different.
Escape This has always said Death Row would pick up the thread of Buried Alive and push its brand of horror further. Clawing free of one death was the first test; this time the sentence is passed by someone who keeps very careful records. He is no stranger, either: the Undertaker who buried you has simply changed his hat and taken a job on the Row.
Ironwood, the Keeper and Mercy are this site’s telling of the room’s concept. The venue, team size and opening night will be added here the moment Escape This announces them.
Death Row is a horror escape room Escape This is building, set on the forgotten execution wing of a prison that should have closed long ago. Your team has been sentenced to the electric chair and must break out before the switch is thrown. No venue or opening date has been announced yet.
Yes. Escape This announced Death Row as the room that picks up where Buried Alive left off, carrying its extreme-horror line from a premature burial to the electric chair. You won’t need to have played Buried Alive first to understand Death Row, because each story stands on its own.
In the story of Death Row, the deadline is midnight, when the Keeper throws the switch. The first announcement gave teams one hour of real time, but Escape This will confirm the final running time of Death Row once the room is ready to book.
The electric chair at the heart of Death Row is a set piece made for the game: the wooden frame, leather straps and metal skullcap you can see in the room’s artwork. It is a theatrical prop built by Escape This, not a working execution device.
In the Death Row story, the Keeper named his electric chair Mercy because he believes it is the final kindness a condemned prisoner will ever receive. Inmates on the Row hear him speak of Mercy long before they set eyes on it.
Midnight is when the switch is thrown. On Death Row the prison generator starts charging the moment your cell doors unlock, the lights flicker lower each time it climbs, and by twelve the chair is ready. Your team has until then to find the way off the Row.
No. The chair in Death Row belongs to fiction and to American history, where the electric chair was first used in 1890. Australian executions were by hanging, the last took place in 1967, and the death penalty was abolished in every state by 1985 and barred nationally in 2010.
The Keeper is the face the villain wears on Death Row: the last executioner of Ironwood Penitentiary, who stayed behind when the prison was ordered shut and carried on its sentences in secret. Underneath, he is the Undertaker from Buried Alive. He fills in every death warrant himself, keeps every date, and has never once granted a reprieve.
The Undertaker, the villain of Buried Alive, is behind Death Row too. On the Row he goes by the Keeper, Ironwood’s last executioner, one more disguise for a man whose other alter egos run Asylum, Cannibal and Meat Grinder. His comic diary at theundertaker.com.au tells the rest of his story.
Death Row takes place on the condemned wing of Ironwood Penitentiary, a fictional prison whose death cells were supposed to be cleared and bricked up decades ago. Escape This is building the cells, the corridor and the execution chamber at the end of it from scratch.
The ledger is where the Keeper of Death Row records every prisoner he has sent to the chair, each name dated in tidy copperplate. Tonight’s page already lists your team. Whether any name was ever crossed out is something you will badly want to know.
Death Row never says. Your team wakes in the cells with no memory of a trial, only a signed death warrant, a cold last meal and the Keeper’s assurance that the paperwork is in order. Proving your innocence matters far less than getting out before midnight.
No. Ironwood Penitentiary and its Keeper were invented for Death Row. The room draws on the look of an old execution chamber, but the prison, its guards and its condemned are fiction, and any likeness to a real gaol is coincidental.
The original Death Row plans included panic buttons for anyone who needed to leave early and CCTV watching every team throughout. Escape This will confirm the safety features of the finished Death Row when it publishes the room’s booking details.
Escape This welcomes costumes, so a prison jumpsuit for Death Row is fair game. Whatever you wear, pick closed shoes and clothes that let you move freely; final dress guidance for Death Row will come with its booking details.
Death Row is being designed and built by Escape This, which makes its sets and props in its own workshop in Perth. Escape This is Australia’s largest escape room operator, with its own escape room design studio and escape room factory.
Put your name down with Escape This and you’ll hear about the venue and the first bookings before anyone else.