Escape Academy review: Escape room fun, minus the stakes

digitaltrends.com:

Sometimes, a no-brainer idea can turn into a deceptively tricky puzzle. That’s the case with Escape Academy, a new indie title that brings the idea of an escape room to your living room. It’s a grand-slam idea, one that the game achieves in many respects, but not without struggling to nail down a few solutions.

That’s not due to a lack of experience. Developed by Coin Crew Games, the first-person puzzle game was created by people who designed real-life escape rooms before the pandemic. Coin Crew wanted to properly honor that experience in video game form, replicating the satisfying joy that comes from solving an intricate puzzle box. Plenty of escape room fundamentals translate to a digital medium perfectly, though others don’t quite fit in as cleanly.

Escape Academy delivers expertly crafted puzzles that shine in a co-op setting, though it struggles to replicate the tension of a real escape room. With its limited number of levels and short run time, I’m already looking to sign myself up for a bigger, more complex sequel.

When the game begins, players are quickly enrolled in a university with the sole purpose of teaching students the art of escape. There’s a spy narrative through line to the game, which links its disparate puzzle rooms together, but it’s little more than a clever set dressing to create some fun tests. There are traces of creative worldbuilding, but they’re a little lost in the briefest of dialogue interstitials.

Each room is entirely distinct from any other, bringing a mix of inventive puzzles to match the theme.

Escape Academy excels where it counts: puzzle design. Throughout the game, players will solve just over a dozen puzzle rooms as they earn Pokémon-like badges. Each room is entirely distinct from