Get ready for our most thrilling format yet: giant escape rooms. Puzzles, traps, great escapes and mysteries to crack.
An escape room is a live-action game in which you’re locked in a closed space and must solve a series of puzzles to get out or complete your mission. It’s a genuinely useful experience: teammates build skills while working through themes that matter to your company.
The catch? Most escape rooms take just 3 to 6 players at a time. Far too few for a company event. How do you run an escape room for 10, 20, 50, 100 or even 1,000 players? Giant escape rooms let you run a game for up to 1,000 people at once, at the venue of your choice. These physical escape rooms slot straight into your event and make it far more exciting. Arcane has reinvented the escape room format with Criminal Quest:
- “Le Crime & l’Ecrivain”
- “The Last Show”
- Biodiversity awareness: “Biotopia : l’Aventure Sauvage”
- “Mafia Denfert”
- Disability awareness: “Follow the Brain”
- The covered passages of Paris: “Apparences Trompeuses”
- Christmas special: “Les Rennes des Neiges”
- Workplace wellbeing: “Les Vilains en PLS”
Looking for a large-group escape room built around your own storyline, objectives and venue? Our team designs bespoke team building experiences. A chance to bring your teams together in a genuinely fresh way, through puzzle after puzzle, each one as unusual and gripping as the last.
> Talk to us about your bespoke escape room
Criminal Quest: the large-group escape room with a CSI twist
Formats have to fit the brief. So we sat down with our game designers and rethought how a giant escape room could work for your teams.
Criminal Quest games are investigation-meets-escape experiences: solve puzzles to move the story forward and crack the mystery. The beauty of the format is that players roam across a large space, with a different route for every team. The real challenge of a large-group escape room is to let everyone play at the same time while keeping the flow smooth, so immersion never suffers. Real team work, wrapped in intrigue and mystery. Our team has built a life-size escape experience for your people: puzzles to outwit, mysteries to unravel, and a clock ticking down.
Why Criminal Quest works
- From 50 to 1,000 players at once. We scale to your teams.
- Light logistics that fit any venue, set up in no time
- Indoors or outdoors.
- Professional actors as hosts, putting on a show to set the mood
- A range of storylines inspired by today’s films and series
- Varied puzzles that call for cooperation and communication
- One shared experience: a common challenge for every team, and real cohesion at the end of it
An immersive storyline
Our scripts draw on modern films and series. No more Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the kitchen: forget the tired old Cluedo clichés. You’re not dusty detectives, you’re the driving force of the investigation unit. Your players step into the shoes of NCIS or CSI agents for guaranteed immersion in these iconic series. Their thinking and their team spirit will both be put to the test.
Cleverly crafted puzzles
Your people enjoy a challenge, so the puzzles in our large-group escape rooms are designed to give them a proper run for their money. Above all, they call on very different abilities, so every team member gets a moment to lead: deduction, dexterity, observation… there’s something for everyone.
Smooth game routes
Big groups mean flows to manage. Our first priority is keeping every single player engaged from start to finish. That means the experience has to stay immersive throughout, with nobody queueing at a given stage. So we design smooth game routes that keep everyone inside the story, from the first minute to the last. Our project managers build alternative routes, happenings, parades and more, so the number of participants is never a constraint, but an asset.
How are the winning teams decided?
In an escape room, the aim is to get out, or complete the mission, as fast as possible. In a multi-team challenge, we think it’s far more interesting to keep the suspense going to the very end. So we use a points system that measures how well each team reasons. Speed is only part of the score. Right up to the prize-giving, the winning team remains a mystery…
Closing the event to bring your teams together
A large-group escape room ends with a full debrief, with everyone in the room. It’s a chance to go back over the facts, clues and puzzles encountered along the way. We then announce and congratulate the three winning teams, cheered on by all the players. It’s a genuinely unifying high point. By the end of the adventure your teams will be closer than ever, and their sense of belonging will have gone up a gear.
What does a large-group escape room with Arcane look like?
Planning a large-group escape room? Arcane will help you build the activity that fits your needs best.
- Your brief, our advice
Our coaches listen, then suggest the format, storyline and budget that suit you. Together we map out the context of your event, your objectives and who’s taking part. We then send you options tailored to your brief.
- Logistics handled from end to end
Once the quote is signed off, our project managers take care of everything. We liaise with your management and your teams, with the venue, and we handle all the upstream organisation with suppliers and facilitators, so everything is ready on the day.
- Ready-to-play facilitation
We handle transport, set-up and take-down of the game at your venue. Our hosts are all professional facilitators or actors, able both to play a character and pull participants into the story, and to keep the game on track. In most cases we also bring in a specialist on the theme, so the group can dig deeper into the subject once the game is over.
- Post-event feedback
Arcane always checks that you’re happy, so we send you a satisfaction survey after every event: how our team supported you, how they performed on the day, how much the players enjoyed it. Our clients have given us 4.6/5 to date. We’re always listening, always improving our company offsites. We also send you photos taken during the event, so you can keep the experience alive with your people long after the day itself.
Why choose an escape room format?
A giant escape room gives your people an event that’s unusual, fun and genuinely memorable. Choose from a range of themes, or have your own game created from scratch. It’s fun, informal and positive, and it adds real value to your employer brand. Forget offsites built around one meeting after another: give your teams something better with our immersive games.
These games also get information across. The playful format makes employees feel involved and invested. They engage hands-on with the key themes you want to tackle, and take them on board far more easily.
In short, choosing an escape room for your team building is about sharing an experience that brings people together. Solve puzzles, hunt for clues, play the detective or the thief, step into a role. It’s a playful way to discover each other and escape for a while. Find out how cool-headed and resourceful you really are as the clock runs down. A thrilling experience, well off the beaten track.
Why run your giant escape room with Arcane?
Arcane’s team love building a game that fits you like a glove: a tailor-made experience that puts your message centre stage and delivers your objectives in style. Team building, training, onboarding day, conference…
Every new project is a chance to open up our box of ideas and pull out the storyline and game mechanics that answer your challenges precisely.
Our teams are full of fresh ideas for the themes that matter to you. Working with Arcane means a professional, enjoyable collaboration with co-creation at its heart, and a brilliant day guaranteed.
Above all, trusting Arcane means logistics handled end to end. We don’t impose a format, we compose one, so every piece is unique.
> Book a call with our team: plan my large-group escape room
Awareness-raising through play: which subjects can you tackle?
Arcane Experience offers a wide range of escape rooms designed for large groups, indoors or outdoors, to unite your employees around the challenges that matter to you. Our activities travel: we work across France and abroad, and coordinate directly with your venue.
- Disability awareness, “Follow the Brain”: We built this investigation game with our partner Réseau H, to explore how the human brain works and the cognitive biases that come with it. These mental shortcuts are often behind our prejudices about situations and people, and they’re usually what drives discriminatory behaviour too (disability, racism, sexism and more).
- Biodiversity awareness, “Biotopia : l’Aventure Sauvage”: Arcane has created a dreamlike adventure, “Biotopia : l’Aventure Sauvage”, staging endangered species through an exhibition explored in augmented reality. Players solve a series of puzzles to uncover the hidden artworks. Our facilitators pull participants into an adventure that sits somewhere between immersive theatre and giant escape room.
- Workplace wellbeing, “Les Vilains en PLS” : how do you step back and look honestly at good and bad management habits, with a healthy dose of humour? In this storyline, players explore the offices of the famous villains of cartoons and video games, who of course find it near impossible to work together. That’s where the players come in: analysing and fixing the communication problems between departments. A real challenge awaits your teams, with roles and perspectives flipped for the length of the game. A unique way to tackle a very current subject in a stimulating format.
- Christmas special, “Les Rennes des Neiges”: We’ve built a gloriously offbeat Christmas game that brings everyone in the company together around a warm, festive escape investigation.
- “Le Crime & l’Écrivain” : Who hasn’t dreamed of feeling the adrenaline of a murder investigation? This large-group escape room borrows the world of Joël Dicker’s novel “The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair” and the series “Les Papillons Noirs”. Participants have to solve the murder of a writer: was it for his work or for the man himself? It’s up to your teams to find out. This activity runs mainly indoors.
- “The Last Show” : This game plunges participants into the world of magic and illusion. They’ll investigate a strange disappearance and solve puzzles to gather the clues that crack the case. It works just as well indoors as outdoors.
- “Mafia Denfert” : This game breaks the mould: players take on the role of the mobsters. The mission is to find the mole causing trouble for the Family, and threatening to bring it down. Pure fun, and best played outdoors as a way to explore a neighbourhood.
- The covered passages of Paris, “Apparences Trompeuses” : This large-group escape room is a fresh way to discover the covered passages of Paris. We’ve written a storyline that blends fiction with reality, enhanced with augmented reality via a dedicated smartphone app.
> Discuss your project with our team
Measuring the impact of a large-group escape room
We always provide a satisfaction survey so you can gather feedback from your teams. Depending on your needs, we can also set up more specific measures: recall rates before and after the event, changes in employee engagement, and more.
