Escape Academy

Escape Academy from Coin Crew Games has you enrolling in an elite school for escapists, where you’re graded on your ability to solve complex puzzles put together by the outlandish faculty! It may all seem a bit quirky to the average outsider, but the stakes are high at this prestigious institute, and reaching the top means being creative, using your ingenuity, and rising to the challenge.

We’ve been eyeballing the game for a while now as it sat in our queue of must play games on Game Pass. I mean, one of the best feelings is brainstorming with your friends, family, or significant other, as you try to work out the solutions to brain busting puzzles! What appealed to me the most however was that Escape Academy seemed to be elevating the escape room genre by giving us fun and quirky characters to interact with, and vibrant environments to explore. You know, instead of your typical stationary scene with a few points of interests that you can poke and prod at. Now, with some extra time on our hands and an increased desire to test our puzzle solving skills, we were ready to finally jump into the game and give it a shot!

What first stood out to me about Escape Academy was how colorful it is, and how its eccentric and cel shaded aesthetic matched the personalities of the people you would eventually meet. It reminded me of playing something like Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast. This design philosophy also extended to the types of puzzles you would solve, since each set of puzzles was themed after each of the characters. For example, you may have to contend with a variety of art based puzzles for the graffiti obsessed Slip, or disarm a bomb for the demolitions expert Bonilla. What I appreciated about its design was that it made the environments easy to parse, which was perfect for deducing which parts of it could be focal points and would help you eventually find a clue to let you move to the next step of a puzzle.

Speaking of the puzzles, what I liked most was how each step in the solution seamlessly fit with the next, making the overall experience of solving them intuitive and exciting. Although you may have to search high and low for the first clue, once you find it, fitting the pieces together comes naturally. I especially liked one of the puzzle rooms where you played as a point person in an espionage mission to save one of the Escape Academy faculty. You would have to guide the operative by feeding them information that you would gather by solving the various logic puzzles within the command room. I also appreciated that none of the puzzles ever felt too obtuse or difficult to solve. I’ll admit there were one or two where we had difficulty connecting the dots, but luckily there was a hint system that pointed us in the right direction. Once we got a foothold it was smooth sailing from there.

Escape room puzzles seem to have been popping up left and right in recent years, and there certainly isn’t a shortage of games that aim to exercise your brain, but Escape Academy truly feels like it stands out. Sure, like any good game of its ilk you’re presented with a series of conundrums you have to unravel, but it's the added charm of the characters, the themed puzzles, and the general chill vibes that this game exudes that makes it as memorable as it is. Instead of just being thrown into a scenario with the singular goal of escaping, your experience is enriched with context and character. Which motivates you to want to keep playing. Plus, it even has a co-op mode where you can play side by side with your friends and help each other every step of the way.

With clever environmental puzzles that'll have you thinking outside of the box, and incremental solutions that piece together like, well, a puzzle, escaping each conundrum couldn't be more satisfying! Two jigsaw thumbs UP from us!!

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