Purpose: Escape room-based learning is a new educational game-based learning trend which embeds student learning within an exciting escape room scenario. Ordinarily these educational escape rooms are in a table-top format which involves learners decoding clues together around a table. In the age of a global pandemic [coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)] with stringent social distancing and lock-downs, this normal game modality was not possible and so an alternate online approach was required. Thus, this paper aims to study escape room activities during global pandemics. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the authors outline how these escape room activities have been taken online, in an synchronous virtual environment and evaluate the student perception of these escape rooms, in contrast to previous cohorts of students who completed escape rooms together in person. Findings: The authors' results indicate that although students enjoy the escape room game-based learning environment, the remote nature of the activity means the students take longer to solve the puzzles. The students are also more likely to struggle in the activity and find them less engaging than the in-person escape room challenges. Originality/value: Although educational escape rooms have been devised for a variety of subjects and can be run through several different modalities (table-top, full rooms and online), this study compares different modalities (online vs table-top) for identical puzzles taken over different cohorts of students.