Room Escape Artist

Napuche is one of the best escape rooms in Budapest, Hungary. Here are our recommendations for other great escape rooms in Budapest.

A fantastic puzzle game with a variant in Las Vegas.

Location: Budapest, Hungary

Date played: August 26, 2017

Team size: 2-6; we recommend 4

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: 12,000 HUF ($46) per team of 2-6 players, student pricing available

Story & setting

We entered an archeological dig somewhere in Central America where we had an hour to explore the artifacts and equipment of the dig site. With some luck and skill, perhaps we could make a discovery of our own.

Set within an old brick basement in Budapest, Napuche’s unusual location immediately set the stage. The well chosen antiques and custom created props completed the vibe. It was a bit musty and felt especially compelling.

Puzzles

There were a lot of puzzles to solve in Napuche and they were far from trivial. Interestingly, it was easy to see what was relevant, but challenging to determine how to use the various components to move forward.

Standouts

LogIQrooms artfully designed the old space in which Napuche took place to enhance the drama of the experience. The rustic look contributed to our archeological exploration and set up some exciting reveals.

The crux of this escape room was truly the puzzles. Napuche combined layered thinking with prop manipulation. The execution was smart.

Napuche incorporated some outstanding mechanisms into its puzzles.

Shortcomings

We had trouble with some of the props in Napuche. Since some of the objects seemed breakable, we explored them too gently and thereby couldn’t determine how they worked. In one instance we had to use a beautiful antique to solve a puzzle. We would never have explored its functionality enough to operate it correctly without invitation. This could be fixed with a little in-game cluing.

The set sometimes responded oddly, such that we didn’t know whether we’d triggered something or it was functioning on a timer. One puzzle, once solved, only remained solved for a limited period of time. This was confusing.

Napuche was nonlinear and not particularly well gated. It was easy to waste time on puzzles before they were solvable. With a larger team, this would have been less detrimental to gameflow than it was for our team of two, but it would still lead to wasted effort on the part of a least a few teammates at any given time.

Should I play LogIQrooms’ Napuche?

We played a number of escape rooms in Budapest basements and Napuche used that old dingy setting better than any of the other games that we had encountered. The game setting and props looked ancient.

I highly recommend Naupche for experienced players. This was one of the more challenging games that we’ve played in a while and we truly enjoyed it.

Newbies would probably be best served by starting with something a little less difficult to learn their way around an escape room.

A variation of Napuche exists in Las Vegas, Nevada. The US version is known as Curse of Mapuche at Xterious Escape. I have no idea how effectively Xterious Escape compensated for their lack of an ancient Budapest basement, but it’s a shorter trip to Vegas for most of our readers. If you’ve played Curse of Mapuche, I’d love to hear about your experience.

Book your hour with LogIQrooms’, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.