Paris, Sep 2023
A wise piece of advice for escape room designers is that technology for its own sake adds little to a game, but it expands the range of possibilities for what you can create. Quest Factory illustrate that principle by using technology to do several things I haven’t seen elsewhere, creating not just the illusion of magic but also beauty and drama.
In The Fléau de Druid, or The Druid’s Fleas Bane, you’re delving into a site that might contain secrets from an old religion, on the trail of a vanished investigator. The Druid here is a lot more sinister than anything you might remember from Asterisk, and in tone this is a dark and gothic game, though not one that sets out to frighten. On the contrary, in places it’s intentionally quite funny, in a way that doesn’t at all undermine the tone for the rest.
This is a story-led experience, with a lightly immersive start that blurs the line between pre-game and game. I didn’t entirely follow the story, maybe partly due to playing in English, but also because we managed to not watch a story video and thereby missed a key part of the plot. As a result we were a bit confused by the way it ended, but that didn’t matter at all for solving or enjoying the game; it just added a touch of surrealism that was all part of the fun.
In places, particularly in the first half, it felt like the game’s flow wasn’t entirely clear, in a way that tended to rely on the (admittedly marvellous) hint mechanism to point us in the right direction instead of letting us work it out from the room’s own logic; I was ready to put it down as a very impressive game that didn’t quite live up to its potential. But as the room draws towards a conclusion, it shifts up a gear, and then again. It has some really cool effects, but what’s important isn’t the technology, it’s how it’s used; and it’s used for a succession of puzzles that were as instantly memorable as any that I’ve played this year. 
