Escape Academy will arrive soon with a unique proposal: that you manage to get out of extremely dangerous situations while solving puzzles and ciphers. We tell you what to expect, here!
Escape Academy is an adventure and puzzle game by the Coin Crew studio that we were able to try out at the Summer Games Fest, during the Play Days event. In this one, users half fulfill the dream of being invited to Hogwarts, but it is not for the “magic” class that you imagine. The title teaches you to be not like Harry Potter, but like the other Harry, Houdini, and you have to escape from deadly situations where your teachers put you.
Story-wise, in Escape Academy you progress by going to different classrooms or parts of the academy, and talking to your teachers, other students, and your friends. The story progresses a little visual novel as you chat and get to know them, but eventually transition to first-person view in escape room-style rooms. Of course, you will have to use all your ingenuity while your life is in danger to get out on time.
In the level we played, the idea was to climb a tower while the lower floors were flooded. Each door on each staircase needed to be opened and each had an individual puzzle that you needed to solve to get the code that would allow you to unlock a lock and get out. It should be clarified that all this was without being able to pause, or stop to think, with the real pressure of your character dying (which didn’t happen to us anyway, but it won’t be that serious, you touch restart and that’s it).
Thus, you can explore and find keys to open things, tools for others, decipher codes and use logic to understand what contextual clues they are giving you to get out. Of course, we are not going to tell you the solutions, but we are going to tell you that this is a game where you are going to have to think fast and play with a pen and paper next to you to manage the chaos that you have in front of you.
If you get frustrated and give up easily, but the story hooks you, a great detail is that the game has a hint system where every few seconds you can press a button to be told where the hand is going. But, on the level that we played, that we hit the button by accident a couple of times and got blown the answer, we wish we hadn’t seen it. The developers assure us that for the final version, you will have to confirm if you want the track or not.
The title has a more than attractive art style, characters with a lot of charisma and a sense of humor that will keep you reading the dialogues. Escape Academy is the game you wanted to play if you were looking for the middle ground between Myst, Harry Potter, the escape rooms and your favorite visual novel. Ok, maybe there are no Hatoful Boyfriend pigeons, but… we assure you that not everything you see there will be human.