Mystique: Fairy Tale (Budapest)

A Puzzle Lover’s Dream (or Nightmare?)

The fairy tales are trapped! By accident, all the fairy tale characters have been trapped inside a magical object, the result of an experiment gone wrong. Unfortunately, if they don’t change back within 1 hour, they will be trapped in the objects forever. We need your help!

It’s important to know that this is not a classic escape room, but a real challenge! Part of the mission is to solve as many puzzles as possible in one hour! The more you solve, the more clever you become! Get adventuring, hurry up!

You’ll need to work together to solve mysteries, find hidden relics, infiltrate secret vaults! It’s unlike anything you’ve ever done before.

Having completed Cube, Pirate Bay, Time Machine, and AI at Mystique, Fairy Tale was set to be the penultimate game we played at this venue. We only had The Lost Crystal Skull to go, but of course we then booked to play The Witch too but that’s another story and probably a testament to how much fun we had in the games at Mystique.

We didn’t know anything about Fairy Tale but it was probably the one that piqued our interest the most simply because of the description of ‘this is not a classic escape room’. Basically this room was a bit of a puzzle dump set up in a total non-linear fashion that you could just work your way through however you wanted. We later found out that this game is bought in from the company Indestroom, so there’s a good chance there could be other copies out there.

We had already had all the health and safety briefings so we were just able to get going with Fairy Tale. All we had to do was to listen very carefully to the instructions from our host on how exactly we interacted with the tech in this game. It felt like a lot to take in, but it soon became second nature and fortunately wasn’t as complex as we were perhaps expecting.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

This was an interesting room in that pretty much everything was available to explore from the moment we entered, no surprises here. The concept of the room is quite simple in that it’s got all the puzzles around the walls in the rooms (two rooms) and there’s a central ‘unit’ that you use for entering the solutions to the puzzles.

This room could have been much larger, or much smaller as the puzzles on the walls could have been placed anywhere. But it was nice that Mystique put in a bit more effort to make the space fit closer to the ‘fairy tale’ vibe. Think big trees with faces, fake grass on the floor etc, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how it looks.

The room is sizable so as a team of four we had plenty of room to spread out, and even with a much bigger team there would be no issues moving around this game. It’s also all on one level with very wide access ways, so accessibility wise it’s probably pretty good.

PUZZLES

Fairy Tale certainly had a lot of variety in the puzzles; observation, logic, colours, pattern recognition, maths,and perhaps the tiniest bit of searching all played a part. Some of the puzzles were quick wins, while others took a little bit more time to solve. I think where Liz went wrong is that she took on one of the more challenging puzzles right away, while I blitzed out a number of the quick wins.

Each puzzle results in a six digit code that you enter using a magic quill on the central unit, and there are different audio effects to signify if you have it right or wrong.

In the end we didn’t quite manage to solve all the puzzles, I think there was one which stumped us in the end, and that wasn’t through lack of trying. Arguably the way the puzzle was written was quite ambiguous and it certainly enraged our group.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

Most of the games at Mystique used walkie-talkies for the clues, but Fairy Tale was different. In fact I recall being told there was no help in this game. That wasn’t strictly true as there was a built in hint system in the game. I think we tried using it at one point for the puzzle that we felt was ambiguous but it didn’t really help us at all and basically just told us what we hadn’t solved.

This is a game where it’s not really designed to solve everything (although we gave it a good shot), so I think if you do get stuck you’re possibly on your own, which could make it extremely frustrating.

ANYTHING ELSE

I could see this being a love/hate type of game, and Liz certainly hated it (*with a passion apparently). Personally I thought it was ok as I liked being able to just move onto something new if I got stuck. But this is certainly not a game for those who like a strong story line.

Success/Failed

Final Rating:

Team: 4 players – 60:00 taken

Address: Mystique Room, 1055 Budapest, Szent Istvan Korut 9

Website: https://www.mystiqueroom.hu/en