Escape Academy scratches the escape room itch, safely from home

polygon.com:

Everyone adapted to the pandemic in different ways. For the developers at Coin Crew Games, it meant shifting their focus from physical arcade games and in-person escape rooms to a project that would let them leverage their strengths, but not require players to be physically in the room. The result is Escape Academy, which launches Thursday.

Coin Crew was founded in 2018 with the stated goal of “bringing people together to play.” Escape Academy meets that goal offering a virtual escape room experience. The game sends players to its titular school for aspiring puzzle masters, where the professors design unique challenges that may or may not involve the danger of painful death. In one level, a tower floods with water as players climb, from puzzle to puzzle, solving thematically themed challenges. Each level’s ladder to the next floor is blocked by a password revealed by puzzles in escape rooms. Learn, solve, and escape is the name of the game.

“A game should be something that you can do with a friend or with a spouse or with family, an activity that you can do to spend time together,” Mike Salyh, co-founder of Coin Crew, told me in an interview. “The game should be fun, but it should really facilitate a good interaction between people. Whenever I see people solve a puzzle and high-five, that to me is, like, the pinnacle. And whenever I see people fail to solve a puzzle, that’s when I break out my notebook and I start furiously trying to fix it.”

High-fiving is hard when you’re sequestered in your home, but Escape Academy is nevertheless highly tailored for social gameplay, whether you’re on the couch next to your partner or thousands of miles away. The game’s local and online co-op experiences are identical; either way, you