Room Escape Artist

Tomb Hunter is one of Bavaria’s best escape rooms. Here are our other escape room recommendations in the region. While not exactly near by, if you’re playing escape rooms in Germany, consider a trip to Berlin or Hamburg. Here are our recommendations for Berlin escape rooms and Hamburg escape rooms.

Fortune and glory

Location: Bamberg, Germany

Date Played: June 21, 2024

Team Size: 2-6; we recommend 3-4

Duration: 90 minutes

Price: 135€ for 2-3 players up to 240€ for 6 players

Ticketing: Private

Game Breakage: Multiple small tech failures

Accessibility Consideration: Highly physical – all players must climb, crawl, and navigate small spaces extensively

Emergency Exit Rating: We are unsure what the emergency exit situation was at various points throughout the game.

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

With Tomb Hunter, Finest Escape Bamberg crafted a grandiose playground of physical exploration. It was impossible not to feel like action heroes as we navigated a wide range of obstacles and physical challenges in an ever-changing and intricately cinematic environment.

The physicality required throughout Tomb Hunter was invigorating without being particularly punishing. We got to do so many truly cool things, and we didn’t have to be parkour athletes for any of them. The flow was impeccable, especially through the first half of the game. As the gameplay progressed, it shifted to include more dexterity challenges, more light puzzles, and more varied elements of physical discovery. We were given time to rest, all while setting individual players up for some dynamic hero moments.

In both name and content, Tomb Hunter didn’t shy away from paying tribute to classic adventurers like Lara Croft and Indiana Jones. I enjoyed those films, and I enjoyed Tomb Hunter‘s nods, general and specific, to this source material. Finest Escape also succeeded in plenty of their own original worldbuilding, crafting some intriguing new aesthetics and entities. Within this, there was a missed opportunity to lean further into an original story rather than embracing certain elements from the Indiana Jones franchise which haven’t aged particularly well, especially when situating players in the middle of the action.

Finest Escape seems to have a clear, yet non-explicitly listed, distinction between their traditional and their premium experiences. I also played Sherlock Holmes and Steampunk Puppeteer in Finest Escape’s Nuremberg location, and while both featured decent set design, they were far more standard in scale, quite worn down in parts, and frequently incoherent in gameplay. They’re older games that also exist, in some form, in other locations around Germany. If I played either as a new escape room player, I’d be unlikely to return to Finest Escape, let alone any other escape room.

In sharp contrast, Tomb Hunter is a world-class immersive experience that’s a must-play for anyone in Bavaria, even just for its unforgettable set design. I’ve heard similarly high praise about Finest Escape Nuremberg’s The Legends of the Magic Academy Parts 1 & 2, though both were so popular that I wasn’t able to book them during my last-minute visit. For companies with this wide a spread in the quality of their experiences, I believe it’s essential, for the sake of their own business and the industry as a whole, to 1) better maintain their older experiences, and 2) make a much clearer distinction between experience types on their website.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Scenery snobs
• Any experience level
• Fans of Lara Croft and Indiana Jones
• Players who like physical exploration

Why play?

• You’ll get to climb, crawl, and do other cool explorer things
• Large, tactile gameplay
• A sprawling set with some epic reveals

Story

A famous explorer had gone missing while investigating the legend of an ancient snake god and the secret to eternal life. We followed his trail deep into the jungles of South America.

Setting

Tomb Hunter dropped us at the entrance to an ancient serpentine temple in the South American jungle. Lush foliage shrouded the intricately carved stonework. There was an abundance of detail all around, and the space just kept opening up in new and unexpected ways.

Gameplay

Finest Escape Bamberg’s Tomb Hunter was a particularly adventurous escape room with a moderate level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around solving puzzles, searching, and communicating, as well as various Lara Croft-esque physical exploration.

Analysis

➕ When we first walked through the doors of Finest Escape Bamberg, I questioned whether Tomb Hunter might have a cold start. This was one of the most expansive and attractive escape room lobbies I’ve ever encountered, fully decorated to look like ancient ruins in a jungle, with a massive staircase running up to a stone idol on a second level. The scenic immersion continued in the upstairs hallway leading to games, which was intricately decorated to look like some sort of desert tomb.

➕ Tomb Hunter‘s set was big, bold, and exciting. They delivered on their lofty aspirations with an incredible level of detail. It truly felt like we were in an adventure film.

➕/➖ An opening transition was highly thematic, but parts of its implementation felt more cheesy than exciting.

➕ Tomb Hunter was highly physical, placing players center stage in the role of a Lara Croft-esque explorer without requiring an unreasonable level of agility. As the experience progressed, not every interaction required every player’s participation, setting some players up for hero moments and giving others an optional rest.

➕ Tomb Hunter utilized darkness and light to ensure that all players could take their time navigating physical transitions without missing out on any reveals that were about to happen on the far side. Our game host was explicit upfront about this pacing, instructing us to wait for all our teammates to catch up whenever we reached a new area that was unlit. I love how this approach prioritized safety without dampening our flow.

➕ Both physical exploration and puzzle solving meaningfully emerged from the set, allowing us to interact with many of the coolest and largest features. While Tomb Hunter wasn’t a particularly puzzle-centric game, the puzzles we encountered felt rooted in both environment and narrative.

➕ A dexterity challenge was tricky yet well balanced, especially given its impressive scale.

➖ An excess of searching in one area of the experience felt underclued relative to the thoughtful lighting throughout the rest of our interactions.

➕ Tomb Hunter consisted of multiple modes of navigation, sometimes moving us forward rapidly through a sequence of smaller spaces and sometimes revealing new layers to a larger space. I appreciated that we spent a large chunk of the game in and around the most jaw-dropping chamber, all while employing various techniques to keep the scene from feeling static.

➖ We encountered three tech failures throughout the game, though none were game-breaking or overly obvious in the moment. Two passages opened prematurely due to insufficiently strong maglocks. We were also inadvertently skipped over the most brilliant puzzle in the experience.

➖ A sequence of late-game revelations and confrontations were loosely referential to some cinematic source material, yet were in questionable taste particularly given this experience’s real-world location. There are numerous possible ways to modernize and/ or generalize such a twist, maintaining the presence of a clear “Big Bad” without needing to be quite so on the nose. As an American Jewish person visiting modern Germany, I was honestly somewhat shocked to encounter a physical representation of a problematic historical symbol in a playful adventure game, regardless of its context.

Tips For Visiting

• Tomb Hunter is playable in English or German.
• Paid street parking was available nearby.

Book your session with Finest Escape Bamberg’s Tomb Hunter, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.