ARoom: Deadland

Ask for Budapest game recommendations and you’ll mostly get the usual list of well-known classics that have been played and loved for years. Ask for recommendations for Budapest rooms that have opened more recently, and Aroom is likely to get mentioned. We squeezed in a trip to them on impulse before leaving Budapest, and picked Deadland from their line-up mostly at random.

It’s an apocalyptic zombie theme, where you (plucky human survivors) are stranded in zombie-infested ruins and need to make contact with other survivors (equally plucky, better fortified) to escape before you’re overrun. No actors will be jumping out at you, the zombies here are strictly of the non live action kind.

The set design was my favourite aspect of Deadland. It’s compact but very clever in how it uses its space, with a great 3D layout. It’s not expansive enough to really sell the illusion that you’re in a ruined piece of city, but the decor works hard to let you suspend disbelief.

There were a few points where we stumbled and needed a hint. Mostly that was observation fails on our part, though in a couple of cases due to fussy sensors. The most frustrating was one where we set something to the right positions to trigger the thing showing that we’d completed it; however, we carelessly didn’t leave it set to the correct solution. The result was that the thing we’d been working on displayed as complete, but the thing it was supposed to trigger wasn’t visible, and we didn’t know what it was supposed to have triggered. That’s a bit of an edge case and due to our carelessness, but really a puzzle shouldn’t be engineered such that it’s possible to show a completion indicator without also triggering the next bit.

The hosting could also have been better; as with some other Budapest venues there was something of a lack of engagement from the hosts, and an impersonal feel to the pre- and post-game experience. Hinting was reasonable, allowing for the language barrier.

It’s not the kind of game you’d travel across the continent to play, but I liked it; I would very happily go back and play more at the venue, doubly so given the cheap Budapest prices.