Montreal, May 2025
Grand Immersia Hotel is a room that would have stood out to me far more if I’d played it on its own, rather than in the middle of a week’s binge of top Quebec games. Even within the same venue, games like Project RESET and Salutem Medicina Institute were smaller in scale, but were built around very distinctive and memorable concepts; whereas Hotel has to settle for being ‘only’ a dramatic, well-designed and exciting escape room.
As seems to be normal for the company, the drama began before the official start of game. “Immersia” is in the name of both the game and the company for a reason, and they go the extra mile to bring you into the scenario and make sure you understand what’s going on, without resorting to anything so clunky as an intro video. And while the meat of this experience consists of the puzzles, it never drops the immersion; interaction and story drive it forwards and interact with the puzzles in smart ways. (For those who might be put off by a mention of actor interaction: the tone is ‘tension’ never fear, and this isn’t the type of room that involves lots of role-play back and forth with an actor.)
As well as the focus on story, I was impressed by the scale of the set at certain points, and I was impressed by a number of the puzzles and their solutions. Our game flow fizzled somewhat towards the ending – we’d unknowingly set all the things for one puzzle in the correct positions for its solution before it was active, so when we did the wotsit that activated the puzzle, the puzzle instantly triggered the whatever that followed it. We immediately assumed the wotsit had triggered the whatever directly, and busily spent a while trying to solve the puzzle we’d already solved. I think that was more likely to happen because at some point they’d simplified the puzzle in question; in any case, it’s the kind of unfortunate glitch that can be avoided with slightly different puzzle design, or defused by quick-thinking from the host.
Although that led to some confusion and frustration at the end, it had been a consistently entertaining and clever game up to that point. It might not have as distinctive a ‘hook’ in its gameplay as some of its sister rooms, and the venue’s most recent room St Onge narrowly outstrips it in both scale and story – but judged on its own merits this is a fast-paced crime thriller which delivers well on the promised immersion. 
