Co-op escape room puzzler Escape Academy is free to keep on Epic Games Store for the next day

rockpapershotgun.com:

While the weather outside is still a bit chilly and everyone’s bank accounts are recovering from the holidays, visiting an escape room with friends might not be at the top of your to-do list. Fortunately, you can currently get some of the same puzzly satisfaction for free - and without having to go outside - by nabbing Escape Academy over on the Epic Games Store for the next 24 hours.

Escape Academy released over the summer of 2022 as a virtual alternative to hunting around a confined space for clues and codes in order to puzzle your way outpu of a locked room as quickly as possible. Like most escape rooms, you can work together with a pal to crack riddles and find hidden secrets together, or go it alone in single-player if you find yourself getting annoyed at someone not quite being on the same wavelength as you while you’re trying to think your way through brainteasers.

Having been on a bit of an escape room fix for a few years now, whether it’s in person or one of those home escape rooms in a box, I enjoyed my time playing Escape Academy with my wife back when it came out. It’s a polished, charmingly presented puzzle game that manages to strike just the right balance between being thinky enough to give you the real pleasure of working out a tricky answer without being too obscure to end in frustration.

Unlike the more nuts-and-bolts sandbox of Escape Simulator, it’s tied together with a bit more of a curated story experience too, though the narrative is definitely a secondary element versus the escape rooms themselves. That's probably not much of a surprise given that developers Coin Crew Games enlisted the help of real-life escape room designers to craft the virtual rooms.

Ed found the same in our review,