Escape Academy Reviews
Escape Academy is a fun, addictive puzzler that captures the escape room magic with plenty of detail and variety, you'll just wish it lasted a little longer.
Despite its empty halls and predictable plot, it's a charming escape room sim that's filled with clever puzzles that reward and rarely frustrate. The entire thing can be played with a bud too, making this a brilliant co-op jaunt.
Puzzle games have to manage a delicate balancing act: If solutions are too simple, players lose interest; too difficult, and they feel cheated, like the answer was never decipherable to begin with. “Escape Academy” was opaque at times, but the answer always felt like it was within my grasp, if I just tried out this one idea, or thought about the puzzle from this other angle. Giving players that sense of empowerment is hard, and games don’t always get it right. But “Escape Academy” walks that tightrope with finesse, joining the pantheon of frantic-but-fun co-op greats.
Escape Academy takes design inspiration from real-world escape rooms, for better and for worse.
With any luck, Escape Academy will be successful enough to warrant a sequel, as its uniquely quirky academic world and its cast deserve to be fleshed out even further with even more meticulously-crafted escape rooms to solve. As is, though, Escape Academy is a fun jolt of great puzzle designs guaranteed to fire up your cortex, topped off with impressive aesthetics that make for some memorable escapes. It may not be complicated breakout one might hope for, but it's still worth checking out.
As it is, Escape Academy is still one of the best cooperative gaming experiences I've had this year and a great start for both Coin Crew Games and new publisher iam8bit.
Even though Escape Academy lacks a strong story, it more than makes up for it by giving you a good number of puzzles to solve.