by Michael Fertitta
If you’ve ever done an escape room, you’ll know the fun comes from putting everyone’s heads together to brainstorm solutions using the limited environment around yourselves. In Escape Academy 2, this core component of collaborative puzzle solving gets blown wide open with a more open floor concept as you navigate a puzzling campus filled to the brim with problems that demand solutions, mechanical or otherwise. After sitting down with a fellow content creator and playing the game for an extended period, I came away satisfied with the gameplay but experienced a nauseating side effect from the overall experience.
The gameplay is about as simple as a puzzle game can be; you can walk around the areas you have access to and press A to get a closer look at your surroundings to try and piece together some possible directions to go in for what puzzles to solve first. When it comes to picking up items that might come in handy later, you have an easily accessible inventory at your disposal. Playing this in co-op, I had the benefit of split-screen multiplayer, where one player could see vital information while the other worked on solving the puzzle. Collaboration is the name of the game (literally, that 2 does more than denote that it’s a sequel), as the puzzles can range from translating sequences of colors or numbers to sudoku grids.
As the subtitle “Back 2 School” suggests, the game takes place on a sprawling campus. Rather than having a room-by-room cadence for level progression, Escape Academy 2 instead has the player expand their horizons depending on how many puzzles are solved, with a minimum requirement for each area door. Players will unlock more of the campus as they move forward, however my demo already had a bit of progress made for me so I could experience the more open areas of the campus. Within this campus space, there are puzzles in nearly every corner of the world between main missions and side quests! Players will have no shortage of things to do, giving this game plenty of longevity for the average playthrough.
While I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing Escape Academy 2 on the show floor, I did notice one glaring issue with the game: motion sickness. I am not sure if it was the framerate or just the game’s motion blur setting from a first-person perspective, but I genuinely felt nauseous by the end of my play session. I hope the developers are able to remedy that issue ahead of their September 2026 launch, as that would make longer play sessions significantly more difficult. Otherwise, this is a very enjoyable puzzle experience that can be just as fun with a friend in local co-op.
Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School
