Escape Academy is a co-op escape room delight

Escape Academy Co-op Header

When I arrived for my hands on session with Escape Academy, the new digital escape room puzzler from Coin Crew and publisher iam8bit, I was expecting to hop into it alone. The first surprise came when I learned that it would be a co-op demo, the second was that I wouldn’t be playing with a member of the team, but a complete stranger who just so happened to arrive at the same time. I already wasn’t sure how an escape room game with a timer counting down would work out in co-op, but to try and make it work with someone who I’d never met seemed even more daunting – after 20 minutes and a completed gauntlet of escape puzzles, though, I was happily proven wrong.

Escape Academy is like Harry Potter but with escape rooms – your protagonist is whisked away to a boarding school designed for the training and design of ultimate escape experiences. The experiences and puzzles themselves draw heavy inspiration from real-life escape rooms, and once you learn that the team at Coin Crew previously worked on in-person escape experiences and arcade machine setups before coming up with the concept for Escape Academy, you can bet that the design will be authentic to real world escape rooms. Except this is a video game, so they can get away with more out-there and dangerous puzzle scenarios that might not fly in a casual in-person escape room experience.

Case-in-point: the level I played during my hands on saw my co-op companion and I trapped in the school’s underground water-pipe system. With a burst pipe causing the room to fill up with water, we had to race to solve a rapid series of puzzles that would let us climb five flights of ladders to reach the exit. A timer ticks away at the top of your screen – for this level, a timer is set for each section of the level, but most will give you 25-30 minutes – but the real tension-builder comes from the slowly rising water levels.

Escape Academy Water Level

As the two of us scan the room for clues and items, the water reaches our knees. As we piece together the puzzle but struggle to find the solution, it’s at our waists. In one moment, after struggling for far too long to find the final piece of a puzzle, we find an item in my partner’s inventory that we had no idea he grabbed, and scramble to turn it into a solution and unlock the next ladder as the water began to creep towards our necks.

When playing in co-op, each player in an Escape Academy level has their own unique inventory, and you can even walk up to your buddy and swap items around on the fly. Maybe you understand a cypher puzzle better than your partner does and they want you to handle that part – or maybe you’re playing with a younger family member and want to give them to key to the locked safe so they can get the excitement of solving that puzzle. It might be simple and safe to just let both players share a full inventory, but the way Escape Academy handles it adds a great sense of organic discovery and even helps fuel moments of bonding.

Escape Academy Under Pressure Puzzle

I forgot to mention that there was a third surprise when I sat down to play Escape Academy – the team handed us a pad of paper and two pens. If I had been playing the game without those tools provided, I probably wouldn’t have thought about it, but with pen and paper in hand they almost immediately became useful during my demo. Scrambling to open the pad to jot down revealed code from a pipe-aligning puzzle felt natural, and using it to decipher a coded message felt obvious. Not many games feel like the paper-and-pen is a natural extension of their systems – maybe Elden Ring? – but for Escape Academy, it’s almost a must.

At just 20 minutes, my partner and I, who at first seemed like an impossibly incompatible duo, escaped the room and came out of it closer than I could’ve ever imagined. It seems foolish, now, to think about the idea of playing Escape Academy by myself. There are clever puzzles and fun character art in there that can be appreciated by yourself, for sure – but the full experience is so clearly designed to bring two people together, and it works like a charm.

Escape Academy is out for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC on 14th July – day one on Xbox Game Pass. There’s full cross-play between all platforms, for anyone that wants to play co-op. A demo is out now via Steam.

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I'm a writer, voice actor, and 3D artist living la vida loca in New York City. I'm into a pretty wide variety of games, and shows, and films, and music, and comics and anime. Anime and video games are my biggest vice, though, so feel free to talk to me about those. Bury me with my money.