Pandore & Associés: Règlement de Contes

A warning up front: even more than most escape rooms, this game may benefit from playing it with zero foreknowledge – so if you haven’t played it already, consider whether you want to read on at this point.

As escape room premises go, this one is hard to beat: you’re being recruited as agents to manage the world of stories and fairy tales. Once we’d weaved through the street market taking place outside and persuaded the host to let us in, we were immediately in a place of mysteries and surprises; Pandore have done an excellent job on their lobby decor. As with most of the games we played in Paris, the briefing was substantial – players used to packing in multiple games with minimal intervals in between should note that they should expect to spend half an hour at the venue in addition to the game time, at a minimum.

This is a game that moves between distinct sections, each with its own appearance and puzzles, and each is striking to look at in a different way. It also progresses in a more interesting way than simply one area after another, with one or two unexpected turns to the story.

So much of Règlement de Contes is delightful, wittily charming and lushly implemented, and yet it didn’t entirely win me over. I was a little grumpy that in the dark section we were provided with one fewer torch than we had players; but that was only one small part of the game. More importantly, it felt a bit over-packaged, a bit of a conveyer belt.

That may be because it’s a pipeline game where another team starts the game before you’ve finished. We were likely more aware of that than most because a technical issue meant we started late, and so could hear the next team in the area we’d just solved; normally I guess there’d be more of a buffer. That structure also meant the puzzles were built such that they needed very little resetting, if any; and in some areas I suspected (perhaps incorrectly) the tasks were designed so that they could be extended or reduced in length, the better to control the flow of teams, and cope with unusually fast and unusually slow groups.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that per se, but for me it nibbled away at the edges of my enjoyment. The sense of personal agency is one of the things that I like about escape rooms; and puzzles that you solve without changing the room in any way are somehow less satisfying than those that leave a trail of opened boxes and released locks. Your mileage may vary!

Having said all that, I really need to emphasise that this is a beautiful, distinctive game. The theming is not just clever but playfully knowing, with a humour that subverts its subject matter without resorting to parody; the best of the puzzles are delightful. As an experience, it feels like it’s taken one step away from classic escape rooms in the direction of being a theme park experience, which has advantages and disadvantages, but if that sounds to you like a good thing then you’ll very likely love this.