If you're an escape room game enthusiast but don't have time to frequently visit offline stores with friends, Escape AcademyEscape Academy 2: Back to School might offer you a relaxing weekend—indeed, this assessment is even somewhat conservative. Its predecessor, Escape Academy, only required collectingclearing the game with 10 badges, which quick-witted players can achieve in just 5 hours. ButIn Escape AcademyIn the demo of Escape Academy 2: Back to School, which only includes Chapters 1 and 2, it took me 4 hours to accumulate 12 academic credits, so how many credits do the locked doors require? The answer is32 badges, meaning the full game must have at leastmore than triple the demo content, clearly demonstrating its richness.
Generally speaking, I don't think“plentiful and satisfying” is a compliment in game design. However, escape room puzzles are fixed; once players clear them, the content is completely exhausted, resulting in very low replay value. Therefore, more numerous and intricate puzzle designs are especially necessary. You can gradually figure out the patterns of the puzzles and reduce your reliance on hints, but a richer puzzle bank means there will always be more challenging designs to test players. And when that final spark of inspiration strikes, allowing you to find every step to escape and execute them successfully, the resulting sense of accomplishment is the charm of this genre.
In Escape AcademyEscape Academy 2: Back to School, I play as a returning student entering a school specifically training future spies, hackers, and thieves. To prove I am the best student in class, I must earn academic credits through various tasks. These tasks come in diverse forms, possibly in a deadly classroom with falling spikesor within a closed tower filled with traps, while the academy's teachersenjoys setting up various surprise quizzes—allall these elements are presented through escape room gameplay.
Actually, in the previous game, Escape Academy, this kind of narrative role-playing was already well-received by players. The comic-style art and the characters' unified British uniforms especially reminded fans of “Harry·Potter”fans of Harry Potter. However, due to limited development resources in the previous game, interspersedthe 2D dialogue-based level mode failed to fully explore the narrative immersion of the world-building. In this sequel, however, the entire school becomes a massive sandbox environment—in other words, theoretically, what you see is what you get, and you can go anywhere on the map. The only limitation on exploration is the various locked doors that require academic credits to unlock. This essentially turns the player's desire to explore into part of the puzzle-solving drive: the better my escape skills, the more freely I can act and thoroughly uncover the school's secrets.
The structure of escape room puzzle-solving in the gamealmost identical to real-world escape room games, players need to observe their surroundings from a first-person perspective3D enclosed spaces, searching for patterns, clues, and items that might help you escape. Combined with different areas of the school, such as subjects like math, physics, and chemistry, the game actively uses general knowledge from various disciplines to test players. For example, in the biology classroom, correctly arranging the food chains of creatures from the ocean, grasslands, and deserts is the key to unlocking the combination lock; meanwhile, in the chemistry lab, a periodic table on the wall serves as a hint, and solving the chemical formula of a certain compound is the level's puzzle.
The difficulty of the game's puzzles steadily increases throughout the semester, cleverly integrated with the environment and narrative. It tests players'logical thinking skills, but also creative intuition. My favorite level during the demo was a tower where the principal locked me in and tasked me with ringing the bell to start the school year. Climbing from the dark bottom of the building to the bright top, solving puzzles layer by layer, brought a gradual sense of ascent. When the bell rang and I pushed open the door, what lay before me was no longer just a teaching building full of traps, but an entire campus with beaches and gardens. This is what they call“At first it was extremely narrow, barely allowing one person through. After walking dozens of steps further, it suddenly opened up. The land was flat and spacious, with neat houses andfertile fieldsbeautiful ponds, mulberry trees, and bamboo groves”that’s roughly the feeling.
Additionally, since text-based puzzles make up a large portion of this game, the quality of localization is crucial, and it exceeded my expectations in its attention to detail. For instance, there was a room where I had to carefully ponder a clever wordplay, but it turned out to be an extremely tricky letter-based combination lock. Although I understood the astrological hints mentioned earlier and entered the names of the constellations as required, I couldn't unlock it. Later, I realized my mistake: I was entering English words, but actually only needed to input Chinese Pinyin. Once I understood this rule, similar designs no longer posed a challenge. For example,If a puzzle hasthe characters 'Sheng,' 'Kai,' 'Tong,' 'Li,' 'Xuan,' and 'Guan.' The requirement is to input word combinations related to victory, where the first letter of the pinyin of the last character matches the last letter of the pinyin of the previous character. Think about what words you could inputto solve the puzzle successfully?
A slight regret is that I played the demo solo, so I didn't reach the peak of the game's fun. After all, just like in the real world, escape room games are often structured to encourage cooperation. When challenging with friends, situations arise where they might not understand while my thoughts race like lightning. That thrill of leading the team, helping teammates who are stuck while smoothly solving puzzles myself, is something solo play cannot replace. This is the unique social experience of escape room games.
Therefore, my demo experience can only share insights on the game's puzzle design, immersive atmosphere, and improvements over the predecessor. The complete gaming experience depends more on coordination with friends. To support this, the game provides fairly comprehensive matchmaking, online play, and ping communication features, allowing players to cooperate with old or new friends to spend a semester at Escape Academy.
In summary, based on the current demo content, Escape AcademyEscape Academy 2: Back to School is a sandbox puzzle game that makes huge improvements over its predecessor and is also great for playing with friends. If you enjoy escape room gameplay, it’s definitely one of the good choices.