Nancymeter - 80/100

Oftentimes im not really a fan of puzzles in games. They're usually either from an indie game just based around one gimmick or shoehorned into a bigger game that do nothing but slow the pacing to the speed of a dead snail, becoming nothing more than a pain in the ass. There are a few instances where the indie game gimmick is just really cool (looking at you, Superliminal) or the puzzles in a bigger game feel like a fun extension to the gameplay instead of a roadblock (and you, Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time) that really get to me and are a lot of fun. I'm happy to say Escape Academy is one of them.

Now the "gimmick" here are escape rooms. But none of these feel the same. They all have their own unique theme and feel to them and It never feels repetitive or like it's wasting your time. The variety in mechanics and settings was a treat. Escape rooms are a big part of another series, Zero Escape and I always loved the idea of them but most of them were just way too complicated for me to wrap my head around. Escape Academy on the other hand isn't a super challenging game, but it hit the perfect balance for me. I didn't feel like I was getting bullied but never babied either, and It was a really rewarding experience. I did resort to looking things up once or twice because I'm a filthy cheater but the game does have an in game hint system. It usually doesnt hold your hand but it points you in the right direction which Is appreciative. There's also a bit of a story to it. As its quite a short game there isnt a lot to it. The ending is a bit abrupt. But whats there was a pretty fun little story to accompany you along your journey. The cast is colorful even though they dont get much time to shine either. It's a really good vibe, as little as there is. I can see myself trying out the dlc in the future, its a world I wanna see more of.

This has been a Nancyfly mini review. Thanks for reading <3
Next up is um - we'll have to see! Fire Emblem... Bayonetta 2....Modern warfare 2? Pokemon?? We'll have to see :p

Trophy Completion - 81% (22/28)
Time Played - 5 hours 57 minutes
Game Completion #142 of 2022
Game Completion #8 of November

O melhor: Puzzles com um desafio bem equilibrado e uma boa experiência co-op, bem mais barato do que uma Escape Room na vida real
O pior: Infelizmente não tem tradução em pt-br, o que dificulta alguns puzzles para quem não sabe inglês
Coisa que descobri só depois que terminei o jogo: Que ele tem um botão de correr...

Escape Academy é uma espécie de "Hogwarts" para especialistas em fuga. Um jogo de puzzle em primeira pessoa sobre um novo aluno da dita escola que tem como exames diferentes escape rooms. Apesar de ter uma história para contextualizar tudo, isso é facilmente ignorável já que o jogo é bem direto no seu gameplay.

E de forma geral acho ele bem sucedido no que se propõe. Eventualmente as fases ficam mais trabalhosas no sentido de "já sei a solução para esse puzzle, mas preciso ir e vir de lugar x e mover peças y", mas elas ficam bem melhores jogando em co-op, o que parece ser a forma mais indicada para resolver todos os puzzles. Uma ótima opção no catálogo do Game Pass para quem quer algo que, mesmo curto, é bem interessante.

This is one of those great GamePass stories, where a game I didn’t even know existed before Wednesday quickly became one of my personal favorites of 2022, as Escape Academy oozes over with the kind of Escape Room charm I once thought could only be achieved in a physical space. The premise of this game is simple—you are training to become a great escape artist, and find yourself in increasingly violent scenarios from which you must escape during your training. The characters and story are not what this game is about, but they were fun and had some clever contrasts in their characterization. However, this game shines most in its puzzle design. This game was actually created by Escape Room designers who feared for their future when COVID hit, so the puzzles all have that unique interconnectedness that I’ve only experienced in physical escape rooms. I loved finding out which element of the room was necessary to solve the next sequence, and I always felt clever when I found the solution that the game clearly had designed for me to find. The only thing this game lacked was the maneuverability of objects in real space… You don’t even have the ability to to rotate items to find hidden crevices or anything, which means the puzzle solutions must present themselves to you a bit more obviously from the first glance at an item. Still, I’m so glad this game came to GamePass, because I probably would have never heard of it otherwise.

Jogado no Xbox Game Pass. A primeira vez que eu fui numa escape room me falavam que parecia um jogo de point & click. Eu fui, gostei demais, era melhor que point & click e virou meu hobby preferido. Desde então, todo jogo point & click nunca conseguiu realmente replicar a experiência de uma escape room física.

Mas agora existe Escape Academy. Todas as salas que o jogo apresenta poderiam facilmente, com algumas modificações (mais em cenários e no contexto mais "real" das salas), se tornarem salas físicas que poderiam ser jogadas no mundo real. Puzzles, pistas, apresentação, eu realmente me senti em pequenas salinhas de escape room, com diferentes contextos.

É uma pena que a parte toda da Academy e dos personagens passe tão batido, ao ponto de forçar alguns temas de salas que poderiam ter ficado mais interessantes sem elas (facilmente as salas que menos gostei eram as mais ligadas à história que o jogo queria contar).

Se você quer ver como é uma escape room sem sair de casa, provavelmente esse jogo é uma das melhores opções hoje. Ansioso pelas DLCs!

Escape Academy is a mostly great time full of decent puzzles and an interesting, quirky story to tie it all together. The levels are well planned out with a range of challenging puzzles to work your way through, an eclectic cast of characters and a fun amount of humour throughout the whole game.

The only place where this game fell short for me and my wife was how stuttery the camera is when you look around. At first, it didn't bother us too much but after having done a few levels in a row, we found ourselves having to stop because, either our eyes were going funny, or we had headaches.

In moderation, this game is excellent. We haven't yet played the DLC but will definitely get it and play through it in the future, probably when it's on sale.

HOPE
MUST
HURT
SOME
FEET

I've always had a bit of a penchant for escape room puzzle games, from my early days of playing Flash games like Cube Escape and Samsara Room to more recent times where I'd pick up and run through installments of The Room in a day, so I'm not surprised that Escape Academy hit the right notes for me. The game plays out like a simplified Portal-like with an inventory; you can cycle through clickables pretty quickly, since the game conveniently highlights exactly what's considered "notable" and fluff objects that just provide a quick text description don't take long to read or unload the description. There's no note taking system built into the game; a little inconvenient, but I'm used to taking notes outside of the game as is, so it didn't detract too much from my experience. For the most part, the puzzles aren't too complicated and boil down to simple visual recognition or basic math problems, and the hint system only needs to point you in the right direction of the necessary interactions to keep you moving forward. Fortunately, the game strikes a pretty solid balance between being just difficult enough to force you to pay attention and easy enough to tool out with just a pencil and paper, and the always visible timer keeps you on your toes but always provides enough leeway, and definitely adds to the satisfaction felt once you finally break through.

What really stood out to me in Escape Academy were the slight wrinkles added to the basic puzzle system + mechanics to shake things up. One level plays out almost like a session of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, where you act as an "active observer" and have to monitor the situation while figuring out crucial tidbits of information on your end, then relay instructions to your allies with your gleaned discoveries. Another level originally has a pretty short timer, but it's actually a segmented escape room where you have to stay ahead of a visibly rising water level, adding on additional time as you make your way up past the obstacles. And then there are the more open levels in Escape Academy, where instead of necessarily just opening doors to "escape," you're performing some timed task like trying to break into a fenced garden to leave your mark on history, or defusing a bomb in the Quad by breaking into trucks for keys and tools, or changing a simple task of opening a locked serving dish for a milkshake into a mad scramble to find ingredients for an antidote while your vision's tinted purple because someone's hijacked the milkshake. Experimenting with the timer and objectives in simple yet thought-out ways really kept me on my toes and helped to make each puzzle level stand out as more than just a contribution to the sum of a product.

There aren't really many glaring complaints here from me; it's more so that I think certain aspects were a bit generic and while inoffensive, could have been improved slightly for a more ambitious experience. There's not much variety to the soundtracks, and I think changing the soundtracks inbetween levels as you progress to reflect the change in moods or an increase in tension would have really intensified the thrill of it all. The story is admittingly a bit simple (you'll see the "twist" coming from a mile away) and there's not much development to the main characters or deep worldbuilding to be had; fortunately, I believe the devs do plan on making a chapter 2, so they've got time to build upon their foundation. And finally, the game's performance could be optimized a bit more; running the game turned my PC into an oven and I still encountered noticeable dips under 60 FPS in singleplayer. Regardless, this was a nice diversion from the more standout titles I've been playing recently, and while I do lament that I wasn't able to find anyone to play this with online, the singleplayer experience was fruitful enough to where I will be eagerly awaiting news regarding the sequel.

This game looks to translate the fun of escape rooms into the video game format, as you work your way through a number of thematic rooms with a threadbare story about a Hogwarts-esque academy guiding you along.

The puzzles here were just the right amount of difficult. Nothing was super obtuse but many required some degree of thought to put together the solution. It did feel accurate to an escape room experience where you get one thing and have to figure out how to apply it to some other puzzle around the room.

The game was a rather stress-free experience for me and really fun in co-op. Teamwork came in handy as one player could stand in front of something as a reference point for the person solving the puzzle. It was also nice just to have two brains working together, but you can also often split up and work on different pieces at the same time. I liked the flexibility here.

Escape Academy isn’t a very long game but my time spent with it was pretty delightful. Would recommend and it was definitely a solid choice on the Gamepass.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but I do like to escape a room - so I thought, why not give a go at escaping an academy hey?

Escape Room games are a lot more common, so if one would like to set itself apart from the pack and not simply be another “cheap indie” they need new ideas, good themes and a little bit of something else.
Escape Academy takes the route of creating a story where the escapes are lessons and they are in a connected story with characters representing your rival, teaching staff and more.
It’s not a bad idea but it is one that did not connect with me at all.
The characters are by no means bad, neither is the writing, but I quickly found myself skipping more than I was reading. I don’t think this reflects well on me but I also don’t want it to reflect negatively on the game. It just feels like a lot of writing and character art I’ve seen already, a style my brain seems to only now associate with “a younger generation”.
It’s a nice art style that has beautiful, soft looking characters but for me there’s no charm, no excitement, I am not gripped and I certainly won’t remember any of their names in a week’s time.

Again, the idea is not bad and whilst the presentation and writing may have felt extremely run of the mill, how the escapes tie together and are varied is a much bigger success in every way. It has what one of these games needs to stand out; diversity, strong themes and well executed ideas.
Not every room is simply “find a key”, one involves multiple tiers as the building is flooding, another has you watching monitors - giving and receiving feedback in a way that is quite akin to “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes” with you doing most of the work.
If there is one thing to write home about, it is that mixture of styles and great themes.
Crucially though, do they contain good thought provoking, head scratching puzzles? Sometimes.

For the most part I would say the puzzles are good, very early on you start to get a feel of what puzzle types the devs like and the structures they go for. Many of you will be happy to hear there’s not much maths, which my brain (always interpreting number hints in that way) caught me out when a picture of six letter D’s simply was meant to represent sixty rather than D possibly representing 4 as the 4th letter.

Once you learn the language of these puzzles none are frustrating but you will take a moment to figure what it wants and like a real escape room, you’ll spend another good amount of time trying to figure out where it’s relevant or how you can get what it needs.
This is where one issue arose for me, and that there are a lot of assets which were interactable were not clear enough. Even more confusing is that for example a box you can open may be identical to background junk which you can’t, meaning you waste your time looking and clicking at essentially nothing.
This along with some stages which felt far longer or more open than they needed to be would eat at time limits that are otherwise very well judged (although I mostly got A+’s so maybe too lenient?).
I understand that different settings have varying open spaces but I feel an escape room should be somewhat confined and the eureka moments should be from figuring puzzles more often than scouring for an important item.

Finally while I speak on some not game-breaking but minor problems. The controls, while fine, did not feel refined. The game is first person and works as you’d expect but I would hope when focusing on a grid or something such as a keypad that I would be able to click along it, not move a cursor, to me that’s less intuitive and also not as realistic or satisfying a feeling - sure you can fat thumb keys on a keyboard in real life but I also tend to feel my hands are controlled at the hands and not like something in a crane game.

If it wasn’t clear I did enjoy my time with Escape Academy and overall would recommend it to anyone who does enjoy a small puzzle or escape rooms specifically.
However there isn’t enough to this game to make the recommendation especially glowing.
It’s good. None of the surrounding elements of story and characters do anything for me personally and without that it may as well have been a selection of escape room puzzles in a menu, in fact, even if it was I think I would just have less to write about and come to the same score and conclusion.

Before I end this, I will say if you are looking at scores and judging whether your time is worth it based on that, then there are a few elements which could increase your score that do not affect it for me.
The obvious one out of the way, if you start to play this and love the art, characters and humour then it’s going to pull you along for a much more comfortable ride.
The main thing I feel bad about not covering though is the multiplayer elements, I am sure that this game can be more enjoyable with friends but I don't even know how it works, whether it’s the same rooms or something slightly different.

Escape Academy, it’s on Game Pass, it’s not going to blow your mind but give it a go if you like to escape the room just like I do.

This is a great room escape adventure and a fantastic coop-experience.
The riddles are fair, the "story" is cool and the game feels original. As an escape room fan, I really enjoyed that.

The only "downside" is that in coop-mode there were some very wanky controls, although I still don't think that's the games fault. It may have been the controller.

But this is rock solid and I am really looking forward to the DLC. Plus, to all Game Pass subscribers... Currently (January 2023) it's in there! Go get it!

Brilliant escape room game.
If you ever did an escape room and enjoyed it then you will definitely enjoy this.
Nice variety of challenges with some well thought out puzzles and a good range of difficulty.

I'd love to see more games like this. You can play this co-op and I think adding an option to play with up to 4 or 5 friends could be a real hit.

Escape rooms are a unique type of puzzle, solving stray visual clues sequentially under the pressure of the clock. Finding ways to make these rooms interesting can be a challenge amidst the plethora of lazy attempts and under-budget production design, but developer Coin Crew has a history of developing escape rooms, so it only made sense to make a video game centered around the 21st century phenomenon.

Escape Academy is a university-themed escape room game, where you are onboarded as a student into a secret school that teaches the art of escapism. You'll be put in several intense situations, and be tasked with getting out of them as fast as you can. The premise and story are silly, but carried enough weight to keep myself and my partner playing along. The dialogue is nothing special, but I was happy to see an effort rather than a string of loosely themed puzzles.

The rooms themselves are the star here, and I really appreciated the variety not only in the puzzles, but in objectives. You don't just escape rooms, you also break into them, defuse bombs, and race to the end of a mind-focused obstacle course. It's inventive and it funnels into the ways the developers have said they wanted to make escape rooms they couldn't make in real life. The solutions to the puzzles within these rooms are usually very fair, and the game provides an excellent set of tools to make nothing too obtuse, from being able to pin certain items in your inventory, to a hint system that vaguely points you in the direction of the answer. Over the dozen or so rooms for the main game, my partner and I really only got stuck on one solve path right at the end of the game. Relatively, the game is on the easier side as long as you pay attention to the items you have and check out each area thoroughly.

Escape Academy is presented in first person as you solve, but characters are portrayed in cutscenes in 2D art. The art style in general is nice, but nothing too unique, and the character designs looked great in their sprites but got a little strange and contorted when converting to 3D in the rooms themselves. The music is also pretty one-note, and only exists to set the mood and let you think. While playing on a base PS4 with two players, the game ran well most of the time, but did frequently hit below 30fps with some slowdown. It wasn't a huge issue, and wasn't very noticeable, but if you want a smoother experience, you may want to try a better platform for multiplayer. Single player, as far as I played solo, had no issues.

Escape Academy is basically made for puzzle junkies like me who are eager to devour any new challenges some brilliant minds have to offer. It's not the hardest set of hurdles, but it's a great time, especially if you play it with a friend (both locally or online!). There is DLC coming over the next year to essentially double the size of the game, so I can't wait to see the even more ways to solve very soon.

You get what was promised. Besides some hiccups with the puzzles here and there, even needing to look up a guide twice, this was an absolute blast. I need more escape room games now.

Played the whole game in split screen co-op, and we ran out of time at least three times so I hope they do modify the timer for single and co-op games, because I'd say two would solve faster than a single person right?

Anyways, as much as the gameplay shines the story is certainly lacking, though serviceable.

Played through Xbox Game Pass.