“This puzzle sucks.”
If you've played enough game titles, or been to enough escape rooms, you've almost certainly thought those words-if not actually said them out loud. It's remarkably simple to lay an egg when you are building a puzzle for someone else to resolve, and that is doubly true when it is an environmental puzzle, one that's presented without explicit instructions on what you're supposed to be doing.
To create a good puzzle, you need to tick off a great deal of boxes: You have to make sure the visual presentation from the puzzle is apparent enough to hint at-but maybe not explicitly reveal-the objective. You need to put an original spin around the concept, therefore it doesn't seem like a puzzle we've seen a million times before. You have to make there are sufficient intelligible clues for players to actually solve the puzzle, which the clues disseminate, numerous, and well-paced enough that reaching the answer feels like a procedure.
Finally, and most importantly, you have to leave what I'll call a “solution gap”-a distance between what the clues reveal and just what the answer really is, which players need to cross on their own. Result in the gap not big enough, and also the puzzle will feel pointless and obvious. Make the gap too big, and most of the audience won't be able to make the leap. But discover the Goldilocks Zone-make the space just right-and players will have the burst of creativity, the leap of logic, the eureka moment that's in the centre of every good puzzle.
Which brings me to the first point I want to make about Escape Academy, the new first-person escape room adventure from Coin Crew Games: There isn't a single bad puzzle within the whole damn thing. Seriously.
There wasn't a single moment during my playthrough (our playthrough, actually, since i have dragooned my not-a-gamer wife into being my co-op partner) that I believed that I had been stuck on a sucky puzzle. It isn't that we breezed with the whole game, either. There have been lots of times that we had to move back and reassess, sometimes for a few precious minutes because the timer wound down, to get at the best answer. But we always arrived. We never even needed to turn to using the built-in hint system, and that is not a brag in any way. It's a testament to how well Coin Crew has tuned its puzzles and balanced time limits on each level to help keep things tense but achievable.
From a puzzle design standpoint, Escape Academy is killer, no filler. It does not just go to the Goldilocks Zone, it bought a house downtown. I wish to ask these puzzles to marry me by hiding an engagement ring inside a locked box and scattering clues towards the combination throughout my apartment. In my mind, the puzzles-the most fundamental facet of Escape Academy, the axis on which the whole experience turns-are close to perfect.
What I don't mean to say, however, would be that the whole game is perfect. Escape Academy is Coin Crew's first release, and that inexperience shows in some technical and presentation elements. The stylized 3D graphics work nicely for the environments and puzzles, but not so much for human beings. Character models are strangely proportioned and stiffly posed, and the animations are ungainly. Coin Crew chosen lightly animated 2D illustrations during conversations, and also the characters look much more polished in that form. So, to be fair, you do not begin to see the 3D models that often-unless you're in co-op, in which case you are going to be careful about your partner creepily shuffle round the whole game.
And honestly, I possibly could take or leave the whole narrative side of Escape Academy. As a means for justifying the different escape rooms challenges, the idea does its job. You receive recruited to enroll in what's essentially Hogwarts for escape room enthusiasts. You meet the teachers and a single rival student. Eventually, you unravel a conspiracy that threatens the school. Like I said, it's fine as a thin justification for the gameplay. But they're likely to have a problem caring about these characters or even the plot twists on more than the most superficial level.
Still, none of those elements really impact your enjoyment from the core puzzle-solving experience, so it's hard for me to dock Escape Academy an excessive amount of over them. There is however one aspect of the game that does let down its puzzles, and that's the controls. My wife and I played on Xbox Series X, and that i have to say that Escape Academy does not feel happy on the controller. I am not a reasonable armchair designer to state exactly what the issue is, but my general sense is the fact that whenever you move the right stay with look around the environment or move the cursor you utilize to solve puzzles, there's no aim acceleration. Instead, you're near towards the races, which leads to lots of awkward correcting and overcorrecting. There are some sliders on the settings menu that can let you tweak sensitivity, however i never got them to a place I was totally confident with. And weirder still, there's no choice to change the default sprinting behavior, which requires you to keep your left stick clicked within the entire time you need to run. That hasn't been the standard for more than ten years now.
The control issues are not even close to fatal, however they do make the game more awkward than it should be and occasionally stop you from feeling fully immersed within the puzzles. I worry it may also make the experience a bit more alienating to non-gamers of computer should be-because this really is otherwise a phenomenal co-op game for introducing family and friends towards the medium. My wife hadn't ever played a first-person game before, even though she soldiered to the end, she never really got accustomed to moving and searching simultaneously. Learning to use both analog sticks is one of the biggest challenges for anybody unaccustomed to first-person games, and also the jerky controls here only actually make it even harder.
The only other thing that might turn people from Escape Academy-and it really shouldn't-is that the game isn't very long. You're probably looking at around five hours for an initial playthrough, however i have a hard time viewing that like a downside. At this stage in my life, I'd prefer to possess a quick and enjoyable game than one that's full of repetitive or less-engaging content just to pad the runtime. More filler would only actually make Escape Academy less killer.
But it is worth keeping in mind that you'll apt to be done after just one playthrough. While the game does permit you to replay older rooms, there's not a point. The solutions are identical every time you play, meaning a repeat-visit speedrun is much more about memorization and corner-cutting than anything actually engaging. I tried out a number of the levels again, and apart from the amusement of beating the very first room within a minute and also the second in a whopping 11 seconds, I can't say I acquired much from it.
Still, if you are looking for five great hours of solo or co-op fun, you could do much, much worse than Escape Academy. Any fan of escape rooms, or puzzle games, or couch co-op should give serious considered to enrolling.
