Heaven & Hell is one of the best escape rooms in Budapest, Hungary. Here are our recommendations for other great escape rooms in Budapest.
Go to Hell!
Location: Budapest, Hungary
Date played: August 26, 2017
Team size: 2-6; we recommend 3-4
Duration: 60 minutes
Price: 10,000 HUF ($39) per team of 2 players; 12,000 HUF ($46) per team of 3-6 players
Story & setting
In Heaven & Hell, our hearts had stopped and we were dead. We had an hour to puzzle our way out of Hell, through Heaven, and back to the land of the living. If we failed in the middle, we would be stuck wherever we landed for eternity.
Heaven & Hell took us on a journey through death itself. The set was creatively designed and unapologetically handmade. The environments were not particularly immersive, but there was a lot of detail and thought put into their representation of an adventure through the afterlife.
Puzzles
Heaven & Hell focused on puzzles, particularly visual, spatial, and mechanical ones. It had an adventure component to it, but this was primarily an escape room for folks who want to work through puzzles.
Standouts
Heaven & Hell took us on a bizarre journey to puzzle our way back from death. It was delightfully weird and oddly charming.
The homemade, hacked-together environments supported the narrative. While grounded in established myth, they were unique, detailed, and amusing.
The story came full circle providing narrative closure through puzzles. It worked surprisingly well.
Shortcomings
Although Heaven & Hell delivered a story, it was not particularly immersive or believable. In the middle, the puzzling was more like a smorgasbord of escape room-style puzzling in someone’s strange vision of hell and heaven.
A few puzzle components were a bit too hacked together and thus really worn. We may have accidentally contributed to the wear as we figured out how to manipulate them. Heaven & Hell would benefit from some repair and refresh work.
Should I play E-Exit’s Heaven & Hell?
Heaven & Hell was first and foremost a challenging puzzle game.
E-Exit wrapped these puzzles in a strange, quirky, and amusing vision of the afterlife. It was weird, but it worked. In this way, it was unlike any other escape room we’ve seen in Budapest, or anywhere else.
While we enjoyed this journey through death, we couldn’t help but wish it were more polished and refined. There’s room for E-Exit to take this escape room to the next level.
I recommend Heaven & Hell most highly for experienced puzzlers who can appreciate how odd this escape room is.
Note that there are two tight spaces in Heaven & Hell… and if this is a problem for you, your gamemaster can offer you an alternative path.
If your idea of heaven is puzzley escape rooms, look no further.
Book your hour with E-Exit’s Heaven & Hell, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.
