Worth to plan a route in Budapest?
In 2011 Parapark opened in Budapest the first escape room in Europe. It was the first city where the phenomenon developed, but it didn’t follow the pace of other places. If you are in Budapest, there is some game that could be interesting, but… planning an escape room route in Budapest? The short answer would be “No”.
In December 2018, after a previous research, we were surprised to see that the top games in all reviews were more than 3 years old. In addition, we had already played one of them in Madrid, Heaven and Hell (we confirmed with the company in Budapest that it was indeed the same game), which, according to our impressions, was just one decent game more. We decided to book two rooms (one of the top in the reviews, Pirate Cave, and a new one, Santa Muerte) and once there ask the local game masters about other games. Maybe we were not lucky, but they barely knew what to recommend; they didn’t seem to be updated. That was a surprise, since in Spain, due to the fast growing scene, professionals are usually updated about what is going on. Thus, we searched again online and played another room (Karib Tenger Kalózai). It was more of the same and we decided to spend the rest of our time to enjoy the touristic attractions the city has to offer (which is a lot).
Back to Budapest in December 2019, we played a room that people recommended to us (The Time Machine) and, since we had time, we also played another game of the same company (Kocka Cube). Even though we must say that the former was a surprise and we enjoyed it a lot, the latter was disappointing.
Budapest has more than 100 escape rooms, a very decent number. Nevertheless, in general, they are very classic and simple, with a decoration between decent and poor. We saw some witty mechanism, but always homemade. There are what they call “3.0 rooms” (namely, rooms without padlocks, only mechanisms), but in our experience the puzzles are tedious tasks rather than a mental challenge. Games have no direct intros and the game master role is not integrated into the story. Rooms are not immersive. Comparatively, most of the rooms are not better than a mediocre game in Spain. It is worth mentioning that few rooms have some merit considering how old they are, but the new rooms seem not to evolve. A good thing is that there’s no problem to play in English; you just need to request it during the booking process.
After all, we can say that we played in the cradle of room escaping in Europe. But definitely we don’t recommend Budapest as a route destination. And in case of being on a trip in Budapest, except for The Time Machine, there is no other room to justify sacrificing any of the many amazing things the city has to offer… In this sense, Budapest does excel!
