Escape Academy

I came in expecting a cute little puzzle distraction and walked out with pen marks on my palm and a strong urge to book a real escape room. Escape Academy is a first-person puzzle game built around the fantasy of attending a secret school dedicated entirely to the art of escaping rooms, and it commits to that premise harder than you'd expect from a game this short. You work through a series of self-contained rooms, each themed around a campus subject, each with a ticking clock overhead and a grade waiting at the end. The rooms range from defusing a bomb before your tea goes cold, to scrambling up a tower that is actively filling with water, to hacking a campus AI that very much does not want you to succeed. No two rooms recycle mechanics from the ones before them, which keeps the whole thing feeling fresh from start to finish. The puzzle design is the real draw and it earns most of the praise critics have thrown at it. Ciphers, combination locks, environmental observation, colour-sequence logic, and the occasional maths problem all show up, and the developers mix them in a way that never feels like filler. The game recommends having pen and paper beside you, and that recommendation is not a gimmick. I jotted down a cipher key during one room and referenced it three puzzles later. That kind of layered, room-spanning design is exactly what separates a well-crafted escape room from a checklist of padlocks. A pin mechanic lets you keep one item visible in the corner of your screen at all times, which is a small quality-of-life call that actually matters when you are sprinting between clues against the clock. Here is the honest caveat though: co-op is where this game fully opens up, and solo is noticeably thinner. Playing alone, you end up doing a lot of mental backtracking between a clue on one side of the room and an input on the other. Playing with a second person, one of you reads the clue out loud while the other punches in the code, and the game transforms into something much closer to the genuine chaos of a real escape room. The split-screen implementation works well even during online play, and cross-platform matchmaking means finding a partner across PC and Xbox is not a problem. The hint system is there if you get stuck, but using it docks your grade, which is a clean incentive to think harder before cashing it in. The shortcomings are real but easy to scope. The story wrapping the rooms together is thin. There are eccentric professors, a rival student who dislikes you without much explanation, and a Quanty, the school AI who communicates via a wheeled monitor. The characters get a 2D cartoon visual treatment that is charming, but the optional campus dialogue between rooms feels like set dressing that goes nowhere. The on-rails narrative with no branching choices will frustrate anyone expecting a proper adventure game built around its fiction. The base game also clocks in at roughly four to five hours, which is short even by puzzle game standards, though DLC expansions and the Tournament of Puzzles competitive mode add meaningful time for players who want more after the credits. For shooter players dragged here by a partner or a friend who has been pestering you since 2022, the adjustment is real but not painful. There is nothing here testing reaction time or spatial awareness in the way a gunfight does. What it tests is observation and communication, and both of those translate well to co-op. Think of it as a teamwork calibration session that happens to be genuinely fun. If your usual co-op partner is already into this genre, Escape Academy is a very solid evening spent. Fred, Scout Team