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.