Puzzle-driven games can walk a thin line: too easy, and surmounting the challenge doesn’t feel rewarding; too difficult, and players might just look up answers or walk away. The first Escape Academy navigated this balance well, but with the follow-up, Coin Crew Games has to balance that tightrope walk in a much larger world.
Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School returns to the titular school, where students’ courses in Arts, Sciences, and more are layered in intricate puzzles and, sometimes, deadly escape rooms.
Where Back 2 School expands the scope is in its open-campus approach: players can roam the grounds, with access to different rooms, challenges, and curriculum gated by puzzles and other required resources.
Whether you’re playing by yourself or in co-op with a friend (locally or online), you must solve puzzles, big and small, to check off quest markers and move forward with the story.
“I think a big thing that the open world has allowed us is more variety in the kinds of puzzles we can offer,” said puzzle designer Jacob Surovsky. “A big part of our development process is testing, and we playtest to make sure that what we’re asking the player to do is reasonable to do in the amount of time we’re asking you to do it.”
The open world, however, lets Coin Crew remove the frequent timer restrictions of the first Escape Academy. Puzzles can linger in the environment, and players can stare and scratch their noggins to their heart’s content, without fear of a ticking clock.
An easy example of how this shifts Escape Academy 2 away from its predecessor is the jumping puzzle I found. A professor tasked me with acquiring some goods from the storehouse – one that’s more of a store than a warehouse – and I needed to get some cash to buy the items. Escape Bucks can be found littered around the grounds, but the fastest path to some walking-around cash is through Extra Credit (side quests). And one side quest wants you to climb up tall buildings and tag them with paint.
The jumping puzzle was so-so for me. Jumping adds an interesting dynamic to Escape Academy 2, and I did like the variety, but as someone eager for puzzles, I didn’t find the platforming challenge appealing. Maybe if I were playing co-op with someone who doesn’t love tough head-scratchers but does love hopping between platforms, they could earn some cash for us to progress while I took the mentally taxing options.
“We want to give the players, with the Extra Credit especially, options in how they choose to engage with the puzzles, and which puzzles they choose to engage with,” Surovsky says. “The Extra Credit kind of gave us the biggest axis of freedom of design.”
This way, Coin Crew Games can segment off some of the more difficult puzzles for those seeking them. And they certainly do have some tough ones. After completing enough small tasks and earning my Escape Bucks, I tackled a longer puzzle that had me guiding a lab rat through a Rube Goldberg machine.
Cryptic clues, layered in color association and phonetic inferences, slowly unfurled a path to the end for my intrepid lab rat. Bouncing a basketball across trampolines, launching paper planes from a slingshot, and plunking down train tracks all helped get him there, though the end result was a long run on a rat wheel.
I really enjoyed the moments when Escape Academy 2 let the puzzles get dense and involved, encouraging me to grab a pad and pen to feverishly scribble notes and ideas. There’s still some polish and touch-up in store, I’d hope, as the scope of the expanded academy led to some minor graphical mishaps and other small nitpicks; nothing I haven’t seen in an early look at a game, so I’m not overly concerned about its final performance.
The first Escape Academy was a charming co-op escape-room romp, and the sequel looks like it’s trying to broaden its horizons in all directions without losing the core curriculum. So far, it’s working. Here’s hoping Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School aces the final.
