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 "Rabbit Hole", inspired by the 19th Century English novel "Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland", is one of some 100 or so escape-room
games that have sprung up in the Hungarian capital in the last three
years, becoming a top attraction for tourists.
Escape games take advantage of Budapest's many decrepit cellars and
old rundown houses. These same spots served as venues for the city's
popular "ruin bars" in the past decade.
Hungary last week held its first nationwide festival of escape
games, with hundreds of teams, Hungarian and foreign alike, entering
dozens of rooms across the country.
"We are caught up in the daily grind ... but in this game we can
drift into a different world where problems disappear," said Adam
Pattantyus, who organized the festival and runs games called Sweet
Escape.
Andras Maldrik and Zeno Zoltan Ferencz, the owners of ExitPointGames
which operates three escape rooms in the "ruin bar" Fogaskert,
opened their first room in Budapest two years ago with an investment
of only about $2,100-$3,000.
Now they are exporting their ideas abroad, designing and building
escape rooms in Vienna and Bucharest.
They say games work well when they require various skills, with team
members searching for clues and resolving puzzles by using logic and
mechanical skills.
Ferencz said ExitPointGames attracts repeat visitors who come back
to try their luck at the other two games: Madness, which is set in
an imaginary psychiatric ward, and Mirrors. Visitors can recover
with a bite and beverage after their escape.
On TripAdvisor, two other escape room games, TRAP and
Claustrophilia, now rank as the second and third most popular
attractions among travelers to Budapest. TRAP also has rooms in
other European cities.
At one of TRAP's two Budapest locations, tourists can do a bit of
time travel back to ancient Egypt in a cellar room that looks like a
burial chamber, or to the Middle Ages in rooms that resemble the
interior of a medieval castle.
"There was a program on television in England many years ago, called
'The Crystal Maze' ... This is like that," said Scott Ward, 46, from
England, who came to try one of the games at TRAP with his wife and
children.
"We fly home today, so if we don't get out, we'll stay longer," he
added.
Games cost about 12,000 forints ($51) per team.
Istvan Karacsony, a manager at TRAP, said game assistants watch the
players via closed-circuit television and give them hints if they
seem to be stuck.
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BOOM TIMES
Nekme, 19, is a student who traveled from Britain to get stuck in
the Middle Ages at TRAP.
"It tested our limits and got us working together. It tested
everyone's strengths and weaknesses," she said.
Video games inspired the first escape rooms at ParaPark, owned and
run by Attila Gyurkovics since opening in 2011.
"I wanted to invent something that drags people out of the grey of
everyday life, and I thought that this game could work really well
as a team game too, in reality," Gyurkovics said.
With over 50 companies running more than 100 escape rooms,
competition is now fierce in Budapest, and newcomers have to offer
something unique if they want to succeed.
On Csepel Island in the Danube river, TrapFactory opened in December
in a former Communist-era manufacturing plant with six escape rooms
and a modern conference room to cater to corporate team-building
events.
With this many competitors, Maldrik at ExitPointGames said the boom
times may soon be over for Budapest's escape rooms.
"We have many ideas on how to develop the escape room game further,"
he said, but refused to divulge more details. Plans, for the time
being, should remain shrouded in mystery, he said.
(1 US dollar = 235.1000 Hungarian forint)
(Additional reporting by Krisztina Fenyo; Editing by Ayla Jean
Yackley and Raissa Kasolowsky)
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