Room Escape Artist

Planning your next escape room adventure in Paris, France? We’ve compiled a guide to the best escape rooms in Paris.

Armchair Ghost Hunters

Location: Paris, France

Date Played: March 18, 2026

Team Size: 3-6; we recommend 3-5

Duration: 90 minutes

Price: from 34€ per player for teams of 6 to 46€ per player for teams of 3

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration:  All players are encouraged to go on a mission. A mission includes stairs, sloped surfaces, ducking, and wearing a blindfold. While heavily discouraged, it is possible to opt out of a mission.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

The Mystery of the Deveaux Family presented a challenge rarely offered in escape rooms: blind exploration.

To that end, our success relied heavily on communication. The players in the control role communicated information to the player who had taken on a blindfolded mission into the haunted house. Each mission, another player entered blindfolded to explore. Through these missions, we aimed to recover information that would help us rid the house of supernatural horrors.

The communication technology worked extremely well, which was important because it was foundational to the gameplay.

The character we met upon our arrival elevated the experience with seemingly random outbursts of intensity. They were amusing, while also always in complete control of our experience. The actor was phenomenal.

The Mystery of the Deveaux Family offered something different to everyone. For the cautious, it was a personal challenge of exploration. For the fearless, it was an opportunity to hone spatial awareness or just explore in one’s own style. And for those who would rather stay away from horror games, this is one where you can help your team from the safety of the control room.

The biggest opportunity for PANIK ROOM was in the control room gameplay, which became repetitive even as the missions into the dark escalated. (This was something that they improved in Cobayes.) There was also room to improve the English translation, ideally by adding voice acting instead of subtitles, which would help smooth over the rough transitions between missions and story beats.

The Mystery of the Deveaux Family is one-of-a-kind. PANIK ROOM took a well-loved theme and brought it to life with unique gameplay, wrapped in an intentional world and elevated by the acting. If you’re in Paris, The Mystery of the Deveaux Family and Cobayes (the next game from PANIK ROOM) should be on your itinerary. It’s rare to encounter a company that has produced two games that are both such unique works.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Ghost hunters
• Horror fans (but it’s also very playable for people who don’t like horror)
• Communicators
• Any experience level
• Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle

Why play?

• The performers were as over-the-top as they were talented.
• The gameplay loops escalated well.
• This is a horror game that you can play with a teammate who chooses to opt out of the horror entirely.

Story

For the past 80 years, all who have dared to enter the estate of the Deveaux family have left the manor swiftly, claiming that the house was haunted and did not want visitors. We had been hired to investigate this paranormal story and find a way to cleanse the house of any supernatural presence.

Setting

The Mystery of the Deveaux Family had us enter off of the street into an old, rundown home. In the living room, we found monitoring equipment. This area was our view into the game world as the players who pushed deeper into the home did so in complete darkness, with navigation assistance from the players in the monitoring room.

The dark world, experienced individually by players who were bold enough to take on a mission, was filled with signs of lives long forgotten. However, exploring players only experienced that space through touch. This is a complicated way of saying that the set was successful in achieving immersion, even if it wasn’t really doing so through visual aesthetics.

Gameplay

PANIK ROOM’s The Mystery of the Deveaux Family was a horror escape room with asymmetric gameplay, meaning different players had different roles at different times.

To rid the house of any supernatural presence, we needed to complete a series of missions. In each one, an individual player would venture, blindfolded, into the haunted house and retrieve an object that could shed light on what had happened there. For each mission, the remaining teammates in the control role guided the blindfolded player.

The difficulty was highly variable. It depends on your comfort navigating the environment blindfolded, level of fear, and ability to communicate clearly.

Core gameplay revolved around searching, observing details, and communicating effectively.

Analysis

➕ We were greeted at the door by a strangely captivating character. They were serious about our mission and the fiction of the world. Their persona was intense, but strangely amusing. Without warning, they would dial it up to 11, and then retreat back to a normal cadence. The actor was outstanding in this role.

➕ The asymmetric gameplay gave each player their moment to be the hero. And while we strongly recommend that each player take a turn exploring the house, the game did not push a player who didn’t want to take on a mission. In this way, even horror-shy players can join their team for this game. Each player’s experience is as scary (or as thrilling) as they choose.

➕ The control room looked good and felt right. We had all the information we needed in front of us on a screen, easily in view for everyone. Furthermore, it was seriously comfortable.

➖ There was opportunity to escalate the control experience in parallel with the mission experience. For those staying in the control room, the experience was pretty one-note. PANIK ROOM clearly knows this because in their next game, Cobayes, they enhanced the control room gameplay.

➕ Communication worked well. The video and audio feeds were clear. While the tech was a little cumbersome to put on, it was not uncomfortable to wear or use. The character leading us was also able to seamlessly take over the communication feed, should we need it due to our own ineptitude, or should a scenario warrant this. No matter how unskilled a team might be, this safety net protects the player who is on a mission.

➖ The video cut scenes during missions were hard to take seriously, in part because if we ignored them (mistakenly or purposely), there were no consequences.

➖ We struggled to context switch to the story-focused videos in between the missions. There was no time to recover from a mission and share the moment with teammates. The game pushed us ahead to the next story beat. We were never prepared for this, even multiple missions into the game. Furthermore, playing in English, we needed to read subtitles (which were riddled with typos) during these videos, which meant we needed to be even more focused.

➕ The missions escalated. The later missions sometimes surprised us.

➖ The basement setting was dusty, and the blindfolds were ratty. If you have allergies, be aware.

➖ The basement was a mess of stuff, and all of it was moveable. It wasn’t cluttered such that it would be a hazard to a blindfolded player, but it did make some missions unnecessarily frustrating. On one later mission (after we understood the gameplay, and with a player already skilled at exploring) the players in the control failed to locate an object. We were searching all around it, but we could not find this very small object.

➕ The debrief gave us an opportunity to see where we’d been, better understand the world PANIK ROOM has created, and appreciate the skill of the acting.

Tips For Visiting

• This game is located at the location at 38, Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs.
• This game is available in French and English. Note, however, that some instructions were not fully translated to English.
• 👖We recommend knee pads. Consider these escape pants.

Book your session with PANIK ROOM’s The Mystery of the Deveaux Family, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.