Montreal, May 2025
The thing about playing several Escaparium rooms in quick succession is that your standards adjust, and you come to take for granted the grand scale and extravagant effects that at any other time would leave your mouth agape. But then again, Forgotten Cathedral manages to be dramatic in a way that should still impress however jaded you’ve become by the time you get to it.
There’s quite a bit of back story to this game, but you’re introduced to it in a way that feels organic, as part of the setup. The gist though is that, right on this spot!, there’s an underground cathedral built by a now-vanished cult that might have toyed with demon worship. This is of course a scary game, but it’s one that aims at thrills not terror, and the intensity comes from the richness of the experience and the immersive quality of the set, not because someone will be chasing you down corridors.
This is an experience which would still be worth trying even if they took all the puzzles out. I don’t mean there’s any shortage of puzzles – there are plenty, and they’re up to the company’s usual high standards – but what really stood out was the cinematics of the game. Via a superb interplay of environment and acting, it sets the scene then plunges you into the story, then takes you deeper into an underground world of startling scale, brought to life by sound and light and an array of technical tricks that are up there with any top-tier theme park experience. Some moments were creepy, others cool or dramatic, and some were genuinely magical.
Amidst a succession of truly superb scenes, I could nitpick a few things – such as a horror room trope that was executed perfectly well but which I thought they could have done more with; or a point where the way we were fiddling with finding a puzzle’s solution started to detract from the drama of the situation. But that’s the sort of criticism that only occurs to you when you’ve been spoiled by too many world-class escape rooms in quick succession. I don’t need to tell you to play this room – if you’re visiting Montreal it’s almost certainly on your must-play list already. 
