4/5 ★ – jared_c's review of Escape Academy.

Escape Academy puts you in the shoes of a young academic going through school learning how to be an escape artist. There's a loose story here that is used to put you in challenges or scenarios of escape rooms to move the plot forward. The first few of these escape rooms are relatively straightforward and easy, but they do pretty quickly ramp up in difficulty to where I was running really low on time for some of them. They do a really good job of making you think outside of the box for some of the challenges. At first you feel pretty inept and dumb, but once it clicks you will feel like a genius. This all takes place in the first person perspective with an almost coloring book aesthetic to it. I think my only real complaints about this game are how obscure a few of the puzzles are, as well as how short the game ultimately is. Each "escape room" has an average time limit of 20 minutes early, to closer to 40 minutes towards the end, with I believe the last 1 or 2 having 50 minutes. In total though there are only 13 "rooms", and due to the nature of the game there isn't really any replay value. There is a co-op mode where two players can run around the rooms which will make some of the challenges much easier (not needing to try and memorize solutions or taking physical notes as I did). Overall, definitely recommend this one, especially as it's on GamePass!