Room Escape Artist

In June of 2025 we brought Escape Immerse Explore to Montreal for the third time. This was our biggest Tour to date, with 104 Tour attendees across the two sessions. After the event, we surveyed these players about their favorite games in the region, and here are the results.

The companies in Montreal have put a lot of focus on character building in recent years, and this really left an impact on the players who attended this Tour. They loved the sets (that were on a scale many had never seen!), and they delighted in the puzzles, but the characters and the stories truly made these games’ worlds memorable.

I expect we will run another Tour to Montreal in the future, but we won’t run one in 2026. However, in 2026, we will take our convention, RECON, to Laval (which is just outside of Montreal.)

If you create escape rooms or immersive games, or if you operate them, you won’t want to miss RECON Laval. It’s a chance to learn from other industry professionals and meet vendors. Plus, there will be a game inside the event, and live entertainment. It’s the best place to meet other industry professionals, share ideas, meet potential collaborators, and strategize about how to grow your business and the industry as a whole. And as an added bonus, when you join us at RECON 26, you’ll be in Laval, just minutes away for all of these world-renowned escape rooms.

The Favorite Game

For the second time this year, we have a Tour with a dominant top-ranked game.

Magnifico at Escaparium was the Tour favorite, with 75% of survey respondents ranking it #1.

Only one respondent didn’t include Magnifico in their top 5, and of those who did, only 3 people didn’t include it in their top 3.

This isn’t surprising, since it is currently the top game in the world, according to TERPECA.

The Top 5

The top 5 games stood a bit ahead of the others in the weighted ranking:

1. Magnifico (Escaparium)
2. The Forgotten Cathedral (Escaparium)
3. Wardrobe For Sale (Escaparium)
4. The Lost Island of the Voodoo Queen (Escaparium)
5. Project R.E.S.E.T. (Immersia)

Escaparium took the top 4 spots with their “big” games, the epic adventures in huge sets, clocking in at over an hour long, and some much longer.

Project R.E.S.E.T stands out differently, for its unusual game mechanics.

Of note, each of the top 5 games was at least one person’s favorite game. Interestingly, no other games received any first place votes. In this way, this top 5 is decisive.

Session Variation

Escape Immerse Explore Montreal ran in two sessions, but functionally 3 cohorts of players. When we break out the data by cohort, we see some variation, which goes to show that in escape rooms, ranked placement is never absolute.

Session 1 ran a week earlier than Session 2. The Optimal ticket played the games in the order we expected to be optimal, building up to the show-stopping Escaparium games at the end of the Tour. The Essential ticket visited the companies in a different order, with the majority of Escaparium games on the middle day.

Session 1 Optimal Ticket Top 5

1. Magnifico (Escaparium)
2. The Forgotten Cathedral (Escaparium)
3. The Lost Island of the Voodoo Queen (Escaparium)
4. Wardrobe For Sale (Escaparium)
5. Circus of Lost Souls (Immersia)

Looking at the data for this session alone, #3 and #4 have swapped spots, by just a hair.

Also, the #5 ranked game changes to Circus of Lost Souls (Immersia), which just barely edged out Project R.E.S.E.T.

The love for this game among the first session players surprised us, as this had previously been regarded as the weakest game in Immersia’s Boisbriand location. However, when Immersia sustained flood damage last year, they had to rebuild a portion of this game, giving them an excuse to rip out anything that didn’t play perfectly smoothly. They made puzzle upgrades, and added a lot of character to the game in other ways, leveling it up substantially. The players responded positively to the changes. Props to Immersia!

Session 2 Optimal Ticket Top 5

1. Magnifico (Escaparium)
2. The Forgotten Cathedral (Escaparium)
3. Project R.E.S.E.T. (Immersia)
4. Wardrobe For Sale (Escaparium)
5. The Lost Island of the Voodoo Queen (Escaparium)

This is the group who really loved Project R.E.S.E.T. For them, it jumped up to the #3 ranked game. Otherwise, their responses match the overall data.

Session 1 Essential Ticket Top 5

There were fewer players in this cohort, so their rankings collectively have a little less influence on the overall rankings.

1. Magnifico (Escaparium)
2. The Forgotten Cathedral (Escaparium)
3. Wardrobe For Sale (Escaparium)
4. The Grand Immersia Hotel (Immersia)
5. The Lost Island of the Voodoo Queen (Escaparium)

We wondered whether visiting the companies in a different order would drastically shift their rankings, but it did not. They have the same top games, with the surprise exception of The Grand Immersia Hotel in the #4 slot. This one landed exceptionally well with this group of players, pushing the Immersia games that other cohorts liked best out of the top 5.

Immersia’s Varied Top Games

A different Immersia game was the most popular with each cohort. This speaks to the breadth of Immersia’s offerings. Each of their games feels remarkably different, and these land differently with different people. They have many high caliber games.

Their newest game The St. Onge Case opened just before the Tour, and thus wasn’t officially on the Tour, although many people added it in to their schedules. It also ranked well, but only about half of survey respondents ranked it.

Other Noteworthy Games

A lot of people asked why we didn’t include Escaparium’s The Final Stop V2 on the official Tour schedule. The answer is, when we bring 104 escape room players into a city (and 65 players at the exact same time!), for a very limited time, we have to make cuts to make the schedule logic puzzle work. In this case, we we had to cut The Final Stop V2. More than 75% of the players who filled out this survey fit it into their trip anyway, and landed comfortably in the top 10. It’s a great game.

While Sauve Qui Peut, the third company on the Tour didn’t land a game in the top 5, two of their games also sit comfortably in the top 10: Falderon Forest and The Wrath of Poseidon.

They also just launched a new game The Castle of Eternal Suffering– unfortunately after the Tour visited – and we’re already hearing incredible things about it. We look forward to playing and reviewing it soon. If you’re thinking of booking it, please note that it’s a very physical experience.

Reactions from Tour Attendees

The clearest through line in all the comments written about the games was how much of a difference the gamemaster makes. Whether they are an actor with a central role throughout the experience, or whether their in-character introduction added something to the experience, many comments came back to the staffing. Both Escaparium and Immersia have leaned into in-character gamemastering since we’d last visited Montreal, and the survey results show that their efforts were worth it.

“Magnifico made me tear up, not just while playing the game, but any subsequent time I describe it in detail. I’ve attended theater that wasn’t as emotionally impactful! It’s an exploration of storytelling within the genre of escape rooms that is breaking ground. I can’t get over it!”

“My best memory from the trip comes from The Lost Island of the Voodoo Queen! Our gamemaster made a HUGE difference. They were amazing and hilarious to the point where we were all hanging out with the REDACTED throughout the game… we all talked about it for days after.”

“Circus of the Lost Souls is a beautiful, immersive space, and the puzzles are creative and fun. However, the thing that makes it really stand out is the performance of the actor.”

“Sauve Qui Peut taken as a whole is also amazing as each room has some utterly bizarre design choice that makes the whole experience of playing there an utter delight.”

“I also want to give a shout-out to Opus Memori, which was not on the tour, because I was really impressed by the fact that they never broke the illusion that you’re visiting some weird cursed manor instead of an escape room, even when paying the bill at the end.”

“Project R.E.S.E.T. blew my mind. I love it when a room does that.”

“This trip really changed my view on in-game actors towards the positive. In the past most, but not all, games that I played had felt more like in-game chaperones than characters.  Both Immersia and Escaparium effectively used actors that drove the plot and allowed for some creativity from the players.”

“I will not soon forget The Forgotten Cathedral.”

RECON 26 Tickets

If you want to play these games, come to RECON 26. We’ll have a whole community of people in town to play them with and talk about them with.

This is in addition to everything that’s happening at RECON itself… speakers sessions, discussion groups, an exhibit hall, a game, live entertainment, and more!

• August 16-17, 2026
• Laval, Québec, Canada
• Event Details

🎁 Use code REA50 to get $50 off a RECON 26 General Ticket. (This holiday coupon code expires on December 31, 2025.)

Escape Immerse Explore Orlando 2026

Just us this April for Escape Immerse Explore Orlando. Tickets are on sale now!

Orlando might not be as hyped a destination as Montreal, but it is a market on the rise.

The top escape rooms in Orlando showcase humor and character-driven storytelling. On this escape room tour, you’ll experience a variety of styles, and some incredible one-of-a-kind escape games. Last time we took a Tour to Orlando in 2023, these were the top games.

Plus, the “Orlando” Tour will be more than just Orlando. We’ll go by bus to Clearwater and Port Charlotte, cities on Florida’s west coast that are also home to top tier escape rooms.

Dates: Sunday, April 12 – Wednesday, April 15, 2026

This will be our first 4-day tour in North America. This design lets us play more games, and travel the distances between them.

More on Montreal

Check out these REPOD episodes with the creators we visited on the Montreal Tour, and whose games you can play when you visit for RECON Laval.

We have two episodes with Jonathan Driscoll and Sacha St. Denis of Escaparium:

We also interviewed Maxime and Roxane Filion of Immersia: