Dubbo Escape Room owner Peter Brunner said locals have supported his businesses through the Covid-induced School holiday lockdown

Dubbo Escape Room owner Peter Brunner said locals have gotten his business through the quiet, school holiday break.

"We have had some cancellations," Mr Brunner said. "This school holidays has been slower than usual without the tourists coming in, but the locals have come through for us. We've been quiet during the weekdays, but we've been booked out on the weekends and Fridays."

Operating since 2017, the Escape Room has been building its visitor base in the community, largely through word of mouth. It's also active on social media, and a lot of its business comes from returning clients - if you've been once, you'll probably go back.

"We're also getting quite a few businesses come through doing staff development bookings," he said. "That's been getting us through the weekdays. Dine and Discover has been great for us, at the moment all of July is looking good, we have lots of bookings."

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If you need incentive to visit - they've added a new room, and made some changes to the existing 'Counter Intelligence' room. Along with the existing 'Aunty Edna's Flat', there are three challenges of varying difficulty.

The new challenge, called 'Witches Temptation', is rated the most difficult. Mr Brunner said, "It's a room with a bit of a twist".

"You have some choices you need to make to actually progress through. It's classified as a hard room, so far we've had about four to five groups get out."

Then there's the new, eye-catching mural at the entrance, designed and painted by talented young artist Holly Faulds.

"Peter just contacted me based off my website and asked if I could do a mural, so I drew up a design and showed him," Ms Faulds said. "I did it over a month but it took about 40 hours."

While most of us couldn't contemplate spending 40, painstaking hours designing and perfecting such a large work of art, it's become Ms Faulds' job since leaving school.

"I love painting. I did a mural at my dance studio - which was my first one and from there I thought, why don't I make a job of this? I'm in my gap year. So I made a website and put all of my stuff on there.

"I've had heaps of comments on the post on social media, which all seems to be pretty positive. Even the people in the (opposite) office blocks say they've now got something to look at.

"I hope everyone likes it."

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