I’ve been in the mood for a good puzzle game. No, that’s not accurate enough. If a good puzzle game came to my door and proposed marriage, I would blow up my life and career for it the same way that journalist did for that pharma bro. (But I’d at least have the good sense to take the inevitable L privately.)
I wanted Escape Academy to ruin my life like that, the same way Inscryption did.
And while the escape room puzzle game / visual novel isn’t the equivalent of Tessa Thompson or Tom Hiddleston — or Tessa Thompson and Tom Hiddleston — showing up at my door on bended knee; I can say it’s more like that greasy guy from The Bearcooking an intimate dinner for two in his furniture-less apartment — absolutely incredible but sparse and far too short.
Escape Academy tells the story of a young escape room aficionado and their journey through a clandestine school where the world’s best escape artists hone their skills with a variety of puzzles. Along the way, you get to know the quirky students and professors who call Escape Academy home while solving puzzles to unravel the mysteries of the school.
The puzzles of Escape Academy are extremely varied, satisfying every subgroup of the problem-solving section in my brain. There are the typical word and math puzzles, some logic puzzles, and my absolute least favorite — the spatial reasoning puzzle. Escape Academy attempts to recreate the anxiety-laced fun of a physical escape room in a video game. But one of the things I enjoyed the most was that you have to get analog to solve the digital puzzles. It’s a full-body experience that engaged my body in ways video games typically don’t. There wasn’t a puzzle room where I didn’t use a pen and a pad of paper, muttering to myself out loud
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