The Temple/ Artefact

The Artefact is one of the largest rooms in Bucharest. The owners managed to fill this space with varied puzzles, cool props and enough adventure to satisfy even the most die-hard fans. It’s one of the rooms that should not be missed while in Bucharest.

Absolutely beautiful escape room made by people with a lot of love for the genre. The setting is incredibly immersive, looking like a real ancient Egyptian tomb. And the GM told us that the attention to detail was impeccable: the hieroglyphs are genuine, the paintings on the wall follow the myth of Egyptian death, hieroglyphs are carved with low relief and figures with high relief etc. Even the duration of the escape room (93 minutes) is not randomly chosen. The room is the largest in Romania currently and it took 3 years to complete. Despite this, the business does not charge more than the normal escape room rate in Bucharest. The room is shaped like a long corridor that opens up gradually towards the tomb as you solve more and more puzzles. The puzzles are great and are very heavy on actual thinking and pattern matching rather than observation. There is also a timed section where you have to move fast across the temple (or have many people around different spots if you have a bigger group) which is exciting and really gives that Tomb Raider feeling. The game also features a very novel hint system: the first room has scrolls with the solution for each puzzle that players can access at will, so their progression does not depend on the GM. It's up to the players how much time they want to spend with each puzzle. More escape rooms should employ this! We ended up using only 3 hints. We used up ~50 minutes with the first 3 puzzles because observation puzzles keep stumping us 😤, but we were very good at all the others and managed to finish within ~103 minutes. You also get to keep a souvenir at the end, so it's perfect for players like us who love having keepsakes from their adventures! Thanks Edi for being a great host! :)