Paris, Sep 2023
The genre of submarine games can be broadly divided into steampunk and non-steampunk variants, and if you’ve read your Jules Verne the name of this one will make it clear that it’s of the former type. And where other rooms with similar themes only take loose inspiration from the source story, this builds on it fairly closely as a reimagining and sequel.
Story and setting are primary here (though the very long pre-game introduction to the plot turned out to be fairly common for games in Paris). There’s more than one possible ending, and to appreciate what’s going on you’ll want to pay attention to the narrative, which progresses while you play. Puzzles are not just arbitrary riddles to solve but are given narrative justification.
For me the real star though was the submarine. In a weekend of top-level, lushly decorated escape rooms, the set design in Nautilus still managed to be striking. That wasn’t just a matter of eye candy in the wall fittings. The steampunk submarine is created in gleaming brass and glass, but more than that: mechanisms are imaginatively original, turning or unlocking in ways that are unfamiliar but logical: the process of working these out is a little like exploring an alien spaceship, or for that matter a submarine built by a singular genius inventor.
In the smoothly turning cogwheels of this game, the grit in the gears was the quantity of instructions. There was a journal of hints (I continue my quixotic campaign against this unfortunate trope) and plenty more written material that was important to absorb. Our hint system was cleverly immersive, integrated into the story and sometimes used to advance the plot. The downside of that was that we felt compelled to rush to it whenever there was an incoming message, which was frequently; if it had been a pure hint system, we’d have felt free to ignore it until we felt stuck enough to need a nudge. As it was, it felt like we were continually being instructed unnecessarily, even interrupted in the middle of doing a task only to be told to do the thing we’d been doing. And although all the reading successfully conveyed a sense of the story, the characters and their motivations, it didn’t give me any emotional investment in them, being wanting to complete the game successfully.
Even with that, Nautilus was thoroughly impressive. Few games combine puzzle mechanics with aesthetics and story in such an elegant way – at least, in the parts that got away from all the written material. It creates a beautiful and atmospheric environment to explore, and makes it part of a dynamic story. The puzzles build up with an increasing sense of urgency to the final high-energy finish. It’s a lovely combination of elements that (in my view) doesn’t quite achieve its potential due to being too anchored in reading text, and too guided by the host – though that may be fundamental to the game concept. But I certainly wouldn’t want to put you off playing it – it’s still a shoe-in for a Paris escape room schedule. 
