Released without warning, Escape Academy is a first-person puzzle game that rides on the trend of escape games to offer us a little game halfway between Harry Potter and Mission Impossible.
school of thieves
In Escape Academy, you are a young chosen one admitted to the prestigious eponymous academy. In this totally fucked up university, the goal is to make you a master of escape to shine as a thief, secret agent and even a politician. The game therefore offers us to barouder in a colorful campus via frozen point & click scenes where it will be possible to meet characters, students and teachers, completely turned on, to discuss with them. Alas, it’s not much use, except to have the right to all white cotton dialogues, a bit of humor, and two or three infos on the lore. Even if the character design is nice and the general atmosphere makes you smile, between you and me, we don’t care about the daily worries of the characters hanging around the campus.
More globally, the plot isn’t much use and follows just like a cartoon. However, it has the merit of relaxing our brains and it’s not so bad, as the software will crush us during its escape game phases.
The Academy of Escape requires you to be constantly challenged in fifteen puzzle rooms, most of which are timed. You will then be asked a very simple thing, cross one (or more) room going from point A to point B while solving dozens of puzzles on the road.
The puzzles keep changing
brain sports session
And this is where the title manages to surprise us since not only the puzzles are constantly renewed but, as a bonus, the rooms are never alike. We will therefore cross every corner of the campus, from the greenhouse to the library, passing through the boiler room, the computer room or even the teachers’ office, while having to face a whole host of mysteries.
Of increasing difficulty (rated from 1 to 5), the puzzles play with us and everything. You will have to have an eye and be able to notice the slightest clue in the decor, search the rooms well (which we go through in subjective view) to discover clues (objects, notes, visual clues directly on the decor, etc.) and the puzzles, then fuel your brains to make the link between all of this yourself and arrange to find out how to get out of the room. The puzzles will call on logic, memory, a sense of deduction and we will even sometimes have to do math! Overall they are extremely well put togetheroften in several stages (a code to discover to unlock a padlock, to then open a trunk that contains another enigma, etc.), and require real thought.
However, it will be difficult to speak of difficulty here since it will really be specific to each person. Obviously, some puzzles are naturally more difficult than others, but everything will depend on your ability to analyze the puzzles and your environment in the pure tradition of escape games. However, you can get help at any time from a dedicated key that will give you big clues to the detriment of your final score (which is only there for decoration).
This will also impact the lifespan of the title which can vary greatly depending on your ability to solve problems. On my side, I put a little over 3h30 to complete the software, without any help, but I remain a regular of the genre. And I must admit that some puzzles, especially on the last part, still gave me a hard time, in addition to making me smile, surprised to see that the developers have redoubled their inventiveness to propose really smart puzzles, always logical, and never far-fetched.
Really smart puzzles, always logical
puzzle addict
Despite everything, we will remain on our end after the final credits, as the adventure is pleasant and the game a bit short. We will be fine the ability to replay rooms over and over to get the highest score possible, but since the puzzles never change, there’s currently no point. From local and online multiplayer is also available in split screen (regardless of the mode chosen). This is funny, but it doesn’t add much more.
Visually, the software opts for a colorful and chubby artistic direction that tends to forget the details. In the end, it works pretty well, but we’re clearly not here to get our retina tickled. In the same way the OST that is content with the bare minimum with just a few ambient notes. Finally we are really on something very raw and cartoonish happening details on all plans.
Overall, Escape Academy lacks only a few things to be a real must-have. For example, we would have liked to have several cooperative or even competitive game modes, even if it means offering some, especially since the game shows us that it is quite possible to put 2 people in competition within a single game. great enigma in its last act (an extremely well-done sequence, by the way).
A dose of randomness would also have had its place to offer a little replayability to the software which is currently completely lacking. So, it is obvious that the game mechanics for solving the puzzles cannot be changed, but their solution could have been, which would have forced us to think a bit.
Finally, note that the development team has already planned a nice roadmap for its game with new puzzles and new places to discover.
Source: JVL
