The growing interest in escape rooms has led to video games being designed to provide the experience in different environments as well. While I have played through a few different puzzle, escape games already, going into Escape Academy I had hopes that it would be not just challenging, but the beginning to a series. Without spoiling anything, it does definitely seem that Coin Crew Games is developing this title to be a full line of games where the player must complete the curriculum of escape puzzles in order to reach the next year. This initial title and first year of puzzles has been published by both iam8bit and Skybound Games, so let’s get into what you can expect.

Story

After visiting an escape room for fun, it doesn’t take long before you realize something is off. Continuing to use escape room puzzle-solving methods, you will end up finding yourself going through a secret entrance and learning that this escape room is actually an surprise entrance exam to see if you are worthy to attend the Escape Academy.

Proving yourself capable, you are offered a chance to attend and to agree you simply have to step on the train. Once you’re there, your first year begins and it is going to be a bit more exciting than you could initially imagine!

Gameplay

This game can be played solo or with a friend, but either way it doesn’t change the difficulty of the rooms.

They do a great job setting up each escape room experience to feel unique. Sure, some of the objectives do come off as a little silly, but getting them completed is intricate. The start of each puzzle gives you a difficulty meter on a one-to-five-keys scale and the amount of time you will have to solve the puzzle. If you aren’t adept with escape rooms, then this scale is definitely going to be accurate for you. If you are adept with escape rooms, the one-to-five-keys scale feels like the first half of a one-to-ten-keys scale. This means your biggest challenge will be to not overthink things!

While solving puzzles, you will only be able to interact with objects that matter. There will be random notes and quirky lines for some objects, but for the most part there is a reason you can interact with the object. This could be an item you need to use in another location, a key to unlock something, or a few other reasons you would need to interact with the object. But overall, the mechanics fall to general escape room aspects where you need to look around, find helpful items, identify what you need to open, and write down any information that needs to be memorized. Fun fact: sometimes writing down the bigger equations helps solve them as well.

To pick which puzzles you work with, you will simply leave your dorm room and then pick an area with a key icon on it. Other locations will have a person icon and that is because there is a character there that you can talk to for a little insight on themselves or possibly the school itself. The year is broken up into segments where you have to complete the current puzzles before unlocking the next set. This helps to keep you on track with both the story and slowly progress to the harder levels. Don’t worry, you can always use the hint system if it does start to get too hard for you.

Every time you complete an escape room, you will be given a badge. You have to gather ten badges to complete the school year. Hopefully, nothing happens between the start and end of the year that you might find yourself in the middle of…

Audio and Visual

Keeping a bright, but light-hearted color scheme was definitely a great fit for this game. There definitely wasn’t much focus on giving high-detail quality and instead a focus on making sure everything is very clearly what it is supposed to be, everything is clearly marked to help move the player along, the puzzles were fairly set up to be solves properly, and nothing is too visually distracting. Honestly, it is the proper aesthetics for a game like this one.

As for the audio, this game doesn’t exactly have a soundtrack that sticks out above the rest, but at the same time, that’s exactly what you want. You will be spending pretty much all of your time solving puzzles, so having music that isn’t loud and distracting is a useful aspect. During cutscenes and story moments, the music is more noticeable and fills the moment with the emotional push that it is trying to drive. All-in-all, good fitting sounds and music style as well.

Replayability

Unfortunately, this is the downfall of all puzzle games. There really isn’t replayability because you would already know the answers to the puzzles. If you do forget the answers, you know how to solve them, which makes it just as easy to get through.

What It Could Have Done Better

Maybe they are just getting things started, but I really hope that the next game has harder puzzles to solve. Perhaps they can consider adding some optional puzzle rooms, call them extra credit challenges or something, and give the more adept players a challenge that they have to solve through. It could be a room with a limited number of hints or forced solo play or just simply harder to solve puzzles with less time. These puzzles were fun to solve, but I never failed a room once and I never scored lower than an A grade… just feels like it could have been harder.

Verdict

Escape Academy has a solid escape room style puzzle experience that is easy to enjoy! I wasn’t expecting it to have a story that actually caught my interest, but it managed to be pretty interesting in that aspect as well. Truly a wonderful start to a puzzle series that I look forward to seeing continued! The fact that it is entertaining to solve, even as a more adept puzzle player, really says a lot about the quality of their escape designs.

Escape Academy is now available on PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and the Xbox Game Pass.