Le Village Maudit

Time Travel to a cursed village

This is the third room at Get Back, and it’s very popular and highly rated in the French escape community. As with the other rooms, the time machine transports us to our mission in the past.

Having gone through the time travel setup three times now, we feel that the intro, text, and video could be shorter and more tailored to the room’s theme without losing any essential elements. It tends to be a bit tedious waiting to start – the intro in Brussels is much more engaging and never boring, even on repeat visits.

We find ourselves in a pub and begin our search for clues. The initial tasks are familiar from other rooms, so we progress quickly. Once again, Get Back has created a beautiful setting, distinct from the others, with high-quality, detailed decor.

The room is dark, and you really need the lamps provided to navigate. However, it’s puzzling why one out of the three lamps is always broken, leaving two out of four players in the dark, passing lamps around. This minor issue can become a bit of a hindrance in a 90-minute room.

What truly excites us here is the room's size, with new, beautifully decorated areas constantly revealed. The puzzles can be tackled in parallel, allowing us to advance quickly at first.

The room isn’t linear, a format we’ve encountered before but still don’t prefer. We lose unnecessary time working on puzzles without the needed information.

Later on, we find that solving a puzzle in the last room requires going back to the beginning, disrupting the flow and causing confusion.

Compared to the other rooms, the decor here is superb, and the puzzles are diverse. However, the attempt at originality sometimes sacrifices logic. We still don’t understand why certain objects need to be placed in specific spots.

Some puzzles lack clear instructions, leading us down the wrong path.

Additionally, our GM’s few somehow cryptic hints, perhaps due to the language barrier, added more confusion than clarity to the game. English-speaking players might face extra challenges here.

We entered this room with high expectations, but like many experiences, it didn’t fully meet them. We left with mixed feelings, sensing that there was potential for much more.