Escape Academy 2 Preview – Puzzles Within Puzzles

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School is everything you would want in a sequel. It’s bigger in scope, addresses its faults, and digs into what made the first one work even more.

A Story and Characters Full of Intrigue

Escape Academy 2 takes place after the first game, with you returning to school as the hero of the first game that everyone knows. Of course, that means you’re understood to be a master puzzler and will challenged as such. 

Getting to know the academy, its professors, the founders, and the overarching lore of where the game is set will be important this time around, too. It’s not that you’ll need intimate knowledge of it all, but there will be puzzles that use that information.

There's hints at some sneaky business going on as well. I mean, they are professors of an insane academy to teach people how to escape elaborate puzzles. They have to be up to something.

Moreover, there will be more context given to any one puzzle. Why am I in this one particular reason beyond solving a puzzle? The developers want players to be engaged more beyond "hey solve this problem we’ve put in front of you." In other words, they're hoping for some investment beyond the nature of the puzzle itself. 

They’ve taken a different approach to the escape room aspect as well. The first game featured a lot of countdowns and timers to ratchet up the tension as you tried to solve the puzzle to any one room. 

While Escape Academy 2 will still feature that sometimes, like in the introductory classroom you must escape, they are much fewer and far between. The developers told us that they received a lot of feedback that people wanted more time to just figure out puzzles. The stress a timer put on everything just wasn't something they were looking for.

Escape Academy 2 Goes Open World Puzzling

To that end, there are two different sets of puzzles and problems to solve. Many will be the classic, here’s a thing to figure out in this specific room. All the information and objects you’ll need will be found there. 

The big change in Escape Academy 2 is that there will be some “open world” puzzling to get involved with as well. You’ll have the Academy to explore, which is of course full of many secrets to uncover. In my brief time with the game, it was hard not to look at every little detail or furnishing and not assume it was relevant to some puzzle somewhere.

Of course, progressing through the open world is gained by solving puzzles as well. That may be figuring out a certain puzzle in a hallway that then leads a nearby student to give you a key card as thanks, or something more. You'll need to gain access to new areas through solving things in the world.

As for the puzzles themselves, what I saw in my short time with the demo was really cool. Nothing was frustrating, I never felt like the information I needed was too far away, nor was there any of the moon logic nonsense some people worry about. 

Solving puzzles was always satisfying, and the pacing was impeccable. I was always just around the corner on some sort of breakthrough while I was maybe collecting some more problems to solve. It felt like I was always making progress even with the conveyer belt of puzzles heading right for me.

Awesome Visual Puzzle Design

Also, so many of them were wonderfully designed visually. It’s hard to not give away too much without explaining, but I wanted to give one pretty cool example. 

I had to solve a few different puzzles to open up a large set of bookcases, but those gave me access to a series of books I could pull out or leave in. The puzzle was to figure out which books to pull out to let a beam of light either travel through it or be reflected off a mirror. I could see the titles of the books and had found a scrap of paper that told me what kinds of books to pull out, like removing the books that rhyme with "rocks", for example.

While doing this, I wasn't quite sure what the beam of light would do or if it was just getting to some end goal. As I went further along, it became more apparent that the beam started to form giant numbers that I needed to input as a code to unlock something else in the room. It was a great reveal that I didn't see coming immediately but was so satisfying to see the finished product.

The most impressive part to me, however, was just how screwing up the books I pulled out could cause the light beam to line up in such a way that it made a different number. It wasn't simply just a bunch of screwed up lines, though it could be that at times too.

My short time with Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School was a wonderful time. I was engaged the whole time and the puzzles were so satisfying to solve. With a bit of a surge in puzzle games thanks to the likes of Blue Prince and others, I think people should keep an eye on this one.

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School was previewed at Summer Game Fest.