Bamberg, Feb 2025
You may not be able to judge a book by its cover or an escape room venue by its lobby, but in this case the huge and beautiful entrance to Finest Escape’s Bamberg branch is an accurate indication of what’s to follow. The sheer amount of space they’ve lavished on their welcome area does not come at the expense of the game rooms – quite the opposite.
Your mission is to find the father of a certain adventurer named Lara, after he vanished in search of the secret of eternal life, somewhere in South America. You might surmise from the game title that a tomb will be involved somewhere along the way. The website description has a slew of warnings: you will need to climb, you should wear old clothes, there will be smoke and a stroboscope. For many players that will be a list of reasons to go play it.
In style of puzzle, Tomb Hunter follows the classics of the genre, with lots of finding the right symbols or objects and placing or aligning them correctly – it just takes the usual tropes and does them bigger, better and more inventively. Pretty much from the start you’re clambering around in a way that’s true to the computer game series that it’s obviously inspired by, with some equally appropriate cool physical tasks. And all that is just build-up to a genuinely spectacular set reveal as you reach the main part of the game.
As you progress, the story moves forward, often via a journal – not a written one that one person has to squint at, but played as audio snippets whenever you trigger the next piece. It’s not entirely clear why our team of explorers wouldn’t just have read the whole journal beforehand, but it worked perfectly well as a story-telling device. I wasn’t completely sold on the dramatic end sequence – avoiding spoilers, it felt a bit like we ended up in a passive role while events resolved themselves elsewhere – but your mileage may vary, and if I’m criticising it that’s only relative to the monstrously high standard set by the rest of the game.
Tomb Hunter is like what you might get if someone with a deep and abiding affection for the Tomb Raider computer games decided to translate that experience to the escape room format, and did so with an excellent understanding of puzzle design and very few constraints from space or budget. In fact, I suspect that’s a fairly accurate description of how this room came to be. Expect a high level of physical activity, and also a genuinely cinematic ninety minutes of solving. It’s a remarkable creation, and worth making strenuous efforts to get to so that you can experience it. 
