Go! Go! GOTY! 2022: Escape Academy

• Game: Coin Crew Games's Escape Academy.
• Release Month: July.
• Quick Look: Here (Jess / Grubb).
• Started: 15/01.
• Completed: 16/01.

I love escape rooms. Not the real thing of course as that would involve talking to and being in close proximity to other human beings. No, I'm talking about escape rooms in its purest form: the video game escape room, where so many components—like running around without getting tired or accidentally breaking something that wasn't meant to be broken—are automated for our convenience. I say that I love these things, but besides those early '00s Japanese Flash games on Newgrounds and, considerably later, Kotaro Uchikoshi's Zero Escape series and (if it counts) Fireproof's The Room franchise, I haven't really played too many of them. That's where the Escape Academy comes to my rescue: a one- or two-player game that quickly gets to the heart of what escape rooms are about in order to educate neophyte escape artists, and by quickly I mean you are constantly being timed and have to shift those brain gears into motion by taking in every relevant piece of information and/or puzzle piece and figuring out where they are to be applied in order to complete these courses fast enough.

I thought I'd be irritated by a timer in a puzzle game, since I'm already irritated by so many things in games telling me to do better (what are you, my AA sponsor?), but it works with the pace of the game's zippy movement and interaction. The puzzles aren't particularly complex, at least early on, so you kind of need that additional wrinkle to add a necessary level of challenge. A typical escape room puzzle—the game has thirteen by the by, with a median completion time of around twenty minutes—will drop you into a scenario with a vague idea of your objective and set the timer going, leaving you to spend the first few minutes familiarizing yourself with the layout and any items you can pick up or interact with. Many will have adjoining rooms that will only open once the puzzle involving their locks has been completed but none are humongous levels that would necessitate a map to get around. As with any escape room the vast majority of the obstacles in your path are classic puzzles: you've got your pipe dreams and your four-litre jugs (thanks to Die Hard With a Vengeance, I'll always know how to do those) et cetera, but also some inventive puzzles involving, say, translating Russian or deciphering code words through a cipher. Many cases of the applied general knowledge type will give you easily accessible guides—you don't need to know binary or Morse code for their related puzzles, since the game will just tell you how they work somewhere nearby—and many inventory objects that offer a code or the key to finding one can be locked to the bottom right of the screen so they're around when you need them. That said, there are a few occasions where it wouldn't hurt to have a pen and paper at hand (or a text file you can alt-tab to or follow on a second monitor) for longer codes that might be tricky to memorize. I'm terrible at remembering directions, personally, and there's more than a few "up up down down" type of instructions you'll need to replicate.

The game's aesthetic keeps things deliberately simple with a cel-shaded look without a whole lot of super detailed models, either by design as a game with a lot of interactive objects that need to stand out in such an unambiguous way where the eye registers them as relevant to a puzzle or simply due to a lower budget at hand, but since you get the former effect with the latter regardless I guess you could chalk it up to a serendipitous design choice. There's a story too linking everything together: you get recruited to the prestigious Escape Academy after playing the crummiest escape room in the city and then completing a secondary set of tasks before leaving, and must then prove your worth to your individual tutors before the game's conspiratorial plot kicks in about a long-missing Escape Agent coming back into the fold. You're also given a rival but there's not a whole lot to that plotline, besides the two of you duking it out in a competition of wits: what makes this funny is that the game has a two-player mode (either local co-op with multiple controllers or online) so I guess the idea is you take on this poor woman two-on-one? The game doesn't ever really acknowledge the other person with you, but there are a few co-op exclusive achievements. It also ends on a cliffhanger of sorts, as you've only completed the first year of your Escape Academy tutelage, so the game's giving itself some space for eventual follow-ups. Kinda reminded me of Psychonauts more than anything, but then I did just play its sequel a week ago.

Overall I'd say Escape Academy is a little more straightforward than a Zero Escape or a The Room, but compensates for the generally easier scenarios with those ever-present timers (not that I ever found myself with fewer than five minutes on the clock, and I'm an idiot). The visuals are plain and simple but that really serves as a benefit as too much detail would be distracting, and I will say that the various character portraits are well done if not particularly varied in their expressions. I enjoyed my time with it, being an easy mark for escape room games, but perhaps it was a bit too much of a breeze to really leave a stronger impression. (I feel like I'm tempting fate by saying something like that if the devs are stealth-reading these internet reviews; wouldn't be surprised if they really twist the knife in the sequel.)

Current GOTY

1. Elden Ring
2. Tinykin
3. Hardspace: Shipbreaker
4. PowerWash Simulator
5. Citizen Sleeper
6. Tunic
7. Signalis
8. Return to Monkey Island
9. HoloCure
10. Nobody Saves the World
11. Escape Academy
12. Ghost Song
13. Infernax
14. Super Kiwi 64
15. Immortality

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