Escape rooms have become a popular activity for those who are looking to have some fun with friends. But in more recent years, people have found ways to make the escape room experience more virtual. That includes making video games around the concept.
That's how Coin Crew Games began the development of Escape Academy. This puzzle game captures a lot of the magic that real-life escape rooms tend to have and puts it in a space for players to play alone or with friends locally and online. While Escape Academy is the latest to pull from this concept, there are other puzzle games that are similar to it.
8 Outer Wilds
Escape rooms tend to have time limits for how long the player has to solve all of its riddles. What if that time limit existed, but the room restarted every 22 minutes? That is practically the concept of Outer Wilds, a game that is much deeper than a simple puzzle experience.
Players start on a planet, but they have access to a spaceship that they can fly around to other planets within a solar system. The goal is to explore and figure out the cause of the sun turning into a supernova and exploding after the 22 minutes is up. Outer Wilds focuses on learning everything about the world and then applying that knowledge to an overall solution.
7 I Expect You To Die
Making video game experiences about escape rooms must try to do their best to immerse the player in the gameplay. Nothing immerses players more than virtual reality, which is why a game like I Expect You To Die is perfect for those who like more intense puzzle-solving situations.
Players are put in the shoes of a spy who must help The Agency with various dangerous missions. The gimmick of the game is that the spy has telekinesis, so they are able to make objects float to help solve whatever issue they need to get over. Each level is timed, so players will need to complete them as quickly as possible.
6 Operation Tango
Speaking of being a spy, what if two people worked together to take on high-stakes missions? This is what Operation Tango is all about. While Escape Academy gives players a room for two players to be in at once, Operation Tango gives players different roles in different places to help complete one goal.
In each mission, there will be one person who is infiltrating a facility and navigating it while the other person is taking on the role of the hacker whose job is to help the person in the facility navigate around. Sometimes these roles may change, depending on the information in front of the player. It's a co-op puzzle experience that keeps both players on their toes.
5 We Were Here Forever
Co-op experiences like Escape Academy are great when each player takes on a different role to help reach a common goal of trying to escape whatever situation they are in. This is also the same concept as We Were Here Forever.
The fourth game in a series of puzzle co-op experiences, We Were Here Forever traps both players in a castle. They are not in the same room together but can instead communicate through walkie-talkies to help each other navigate the incredibly scary circumstance that they find themselves in.
4 Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes
It can be intense to try to solve a puzzle within a short allotment of time, it can be even worse when dealing with a literal ticking time bomb. Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes puts a player at a desk where they will be given a bomb that they will need to fiddle with to ultimately deactivate.
Unfortunately, this player is not given an instruction manual. Luckily, another person can download the manual and help the player along the way. However, the rules of the game indicate that they can't look at the screen while they do so. This is a great game about communication and working together to avoid destruction.
3 Inscryption
Being trapped in a room with no clear way to escape can be very scary, so it makes sense that there are scarier games with escape room elements. However, this is only a small part of what Inscryption truly turns out to be.
While having a lot of escape room elements throughout the game, a core mechanic of Inscryption is the card game that players are taught early on. This deckbuilding roguelike pits players against a creepy figure named Leshy who enjoys constantly playing the game with the player.
2 The Room
The best part of being in an escape room is fiddling with all the strange contraptions that are presented to the people in there that ultimately lead to discovering an important clue or even the way out. The Room is all about playing with this exact concept.
With four games released in the series thus far, The Room captivates players by presenting them with various boxes that have many different mechanisms on them that are meant to be tinkered with. All the while, there is an overarching narrative that unlocks with each puzzle cracked across multiple levels.
1 Escape Simulator
If players just want more escape rooms to mess around in, Escape Simulator is well worth the time as it has its own set of rooms to conquer that aren't necessarily tied to a narrative like Escape Academy is. There are 20 rooms that players can play through, with up to three players.
Along with being able to customize characters, Escape Simulator also has a level editor that allows members of the community to make their own rooms with an easy-to-learn UI. Each level has its own overall theme to it, including Ancient Egypt, Space, Mansion, and Corporation.
Escape Academy is available now on Windows, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One.