Room Escape Artist

Le Prince is one of Belgium’s best escape rooms. Here are our other escape room recommendations in Belgium.

Picture perfect 📷

Location: Retie, Belgium

Date Played: March 2, 2025

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

Duration: 90 minutes

Price: €150 per team

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: At least one player must crawl and climb

Emergency Exit Rating: [A] Push To Exit

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

Le Prince was not themed around a prince, but rather a real historical figure: Louis Le Prince, a French inventor who is known as the “Father of Cinematography” and creator of one of the earliest motion picture cameras. Much of Le Prince took place at the workshop of a contemporaneous figure, Louis Daguerre, who was good friends with Le Prince’s father. Daguerre is most famous as inventor of both the diorama and the eponymous daguerrotype, a popular early photographic technique.

Within this fascinating historical framing, Escaping Belgium crafted a bounty of satisfying puzzles that showcased an unusually high attention to detail. The experience flowed incredibly well, both due to the thoughtful puzzle design as well as lighting that dynamically showed us what was active. Each puzzle pulled us into a different prop or scene, particularly when engaging with the minutiae of Daguerre’s delightful dioramas.

I love when escape rooms explore unusual stories and histories, and to a large extent, Le Prince did precisely that. The plot of Le Prince placed us at the center of the most mysterious part of Louis Le Prince’s life: his disappearance on September 16, 1890. We investigated various figures who were rumored to have been after Le Prince’s plans, including Thomas Edison, who ultimately stole credit for Le Prince’s cinematographic innovations (*shakes fist in air at Edison!*)

While this tangle of conspiracy theories was certainly ripe for escape room-ification, there was an opportunity to dive even deeper into Le Prince’s process as an inventor and use photographic innovation as the basis for more puzzles. And although we appreciated how every tiny detail was so well researched, we wished that even more of this historical context had emerged directly through the gameplay, especially around Daguerre’s background, his specific connection to Le Prince, and how he came to create the truly phenomenal dioramas we encountered.

Amongst the many action-packed, spectacle-centric escape rooms that fill the Benelux region, Le Prince was a stark outlier as a more soft-spoken, puzzle-forward experience. I adored this intricate style, and for puzzle lovers with an eye for detail, Le Prince is not to be missed.

Who is this for?

• Puzzle lovers
• Scenery snobs
• Best for players with at least some experience
• Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle

Why play?

• Creative puzzle design
• Alluringly detailed environments
• A deep dive into real history

Story

Louis Le Prince suspected that he’d been followed, and that someone was after the plans for his most recent invention. We investigated the suspects and helped Le Prince to plot his escape.

Setting

Le Prince took place at the studio of inventor Louis Daguerre. Nestled away on a quiet Parisian street, every nook and cranny of the workshop was filled with an eclectic range of tools, photographic equipment, and international oddities. Period-appropriate lighting, furniture, and wallpaper deepened the immersion.

Gameplay

Escaping Belgium’s Le Prince was a standard escape room with a moderate level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around making connections and solving puzzles.

Analysis

➕ Le Prince thrived in the details. Within meticulously curated environments, Escaping Belgium centered distinctive interactions around interesting objects, often punctuated by satisfying visual reveals.

➕ Escaping Belgium masterfully used lighting as both signposting and progress indication, guiding our attention with pinpoint accuracy.

➕/❓ The opening act helped to situate Daguerre’s studio within the broader world, and a puzzle here furthered our appreciation of the world’s inhabitants. However, given that most of Le Prince was centered more around nuanced puzzling than adventure or emotion-driven narrative, we questioned whether the style of this initial environment set the wrong expectations for the rest of the game.

➕  A creative inversion of a classic game kept us guessing. One of my teammates commented that he wished this puzzle had more levels so we could keep playing.

➕ A counting puzzle was cleverly designed to be an actual puzzle — not just a rote task — with multiple ahas that were sneaky yet fair.

➕ Through a series of detailed props and a thematic puzzle, Le Prince paid homage to Epic Escape’s Illusion. We enjoyed seeing how many escape rooms throughout Belgium and the Netherlands contained Easter eggs to other top escape rooms in the region, and this was one of our absolute favorite examples. It enhances both games when they live in a shared world of reality-bending historical fiction.

➕ Le Prince played with scale, creatively utilizing small dioramas and tiny bits of movements throughout multiple puzzles. A puzzle that subverted multiple escape room tropes involving drawers was particularly rewarding.

➖ A circuitous puzzle was more tedious than fun and had an unclear connection to the theme.

➕ A multi-player interaction put a fun twist on a common dexterity puzzle type while also making excellent use of a compact space. This segment was further elevated by brilliant lighting that made the scene as engaging for spectators as it was for participants.

➖ The final puzzle of Le Prince was arguably also the weakest. Given the clever, layered puzzle design and intricate object design that characterized the vast majority of the gameplay up to that point, there was a missed opportunity to create some sort of metapuzzle which could have tied the preceding puzzles together in a more satisfying and climactic way.

📷 For an escape room about a photographic innovator, our team photo was relatively generic. Something like a daguerreotype-inspired filter could have made this post-game souvenir instantly more thematic and iconic.

Tips For Visiting

• There was a parking lot.

Book your hour with Escaping Belgium’s Le Prince, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.