Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School Review – Top Marks, Too Much Homework

I was never one to cower from a good puzzle in a video game, and I love it when a game makes me think really hard to solve one. What I don't like at all, though, is when a game does nothing else but throw puzzle after puzzle your way, because it simply becomes too tiring and tedious.

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School is one such game. Everywhere you step, a puzzle awaits, and if not a puzzle, then an escape room where you must solve a bunch of them, often with time pressing you to do it as fast as possible. There, I said it. I simply had to get it off my chest right in the introduction because this is the biggest thing that bothered me about Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School, and almost everything else is very good.

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Surviving the spikes is only step one of orientation, and the puzzles don't stop there.

Story – New Year, Old Secrets

In Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School, the story is mostly an excuse to give you as many puzzles as possible to solve, and it is never the main reason to keep playing.

The setup doesn't hold many surprises either. Judging by the title alone, without checking anything online, I figured out that this is a sequel to the previous game (I mean, the number 2 is literally in the title twice). The game begins with you and your future classmates waiting for the school train, and it introduces its concept right away.

Soon you'll find out, through conversations with your friends and professors, that you were last year's best student and best escapist, and that this year holds even more challenges for you to prove yourself and either keep the title or let someone else beat you. In essence, new year, new puzzles and new escape rooms. Blunt as a hammer, to put it simply. There is more to it than that, though, because a dark mystery about the school's founding runs beneath all of this, with revelations about what the Academy really is. It gives the story some much-needed weight, but the puzzles remain the star of the show.

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Being last year's top student gets you a warm welcome and an even bigger pile of puzzles.

Gameplay – Homework at Every Step

Of course, the gameplay is where Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School earns its stripes, and it earns them rightfully. As I mentioned earlier, the game shows you right away that it means business, and this time, everything is elevated to a whole new level.

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School has a kind of open-world structure, where you walk around and pick up missions. It is not a classic open world because the game lacks a map, a crucial tool for open-world games. Instead, you have signposts showing you which way to go to reach certain sections of the campus.

The campus is really huge, from the main school building with its dorms to the courtyard that connects the different sections and the classrooms for different subjects. Everything feels big and full of life, and it is designed perfectly to fit in loads of puzzles.

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With no map to open, signposts are all you have to find your way around this huge campus.

Once you solve an escape room, which is labelled as the main questline in Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School, you'll get a certain number of puzzle pieces, and each section requires a certain number of those pieces to be unlocked. More difficult areas require more pieces, and that is what paves your way through the game. As I said earlier, it is an open-world structure, but because of the puzzle-piece concept, your choice of where to go first and in which order to tackle quests is quite limited. So the open world here is nothing more than an illusion, but that is just an observation rather than a complaint, and it doesn't make the game any worse for wear.

Apart from the main quests, you can take part in many side quests scattered around the campus. These reward you with Escape Bucks, the second currency in the game. You'll use Escape Bucks to buy helpers, like ziplines that let you traverse the campus faster, or other power-ups that simplify your everyday tasks.

The puzzles themselves are not the hardest you'll encounter, but they are very well designed and pose a fair amount of challenge. Some made me think way harder than I usually do in games like this, while others practically solve themselves, and this mix is just perfect because it lets you breathe a little between the bigger escape rooms.

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Even the Clown Club has a puzzle waiting, because this campus never lets you walk far without one.

Every major quest features an escape room, where you're locked in until you solve a series of puzzles. These rooms sometimes press you with a time limit. For example, the first escape room features a spiked ceiling that will kill you if you don't solve the puzzle in time. The time limit is usually very generous, and if you fail, the game reloads the checkpoint before the escape room. On the next attempt, you'll already know how to solve everything up to the point where you messed up.

As for the difficulty, Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School is quite approachable. You don't need any special knowledge to solve its puzzles, and if you get stuck, hints are there to help you. The time limits are the main source of pressure, but if that isn't for you, you can turn the clock off with the optional No-Timer Mode and solve everything at your own pace. I kept the timer on because the limits are generous and the ticking clock adds a lot of tension. If you want a bigger challenge, the side quests hold some of the tougher puzzles.

After each escape room, your work is graded, and your rating depends mostly on how fast you solve the puzzles. You can always trick the game here if that is something you like to do. Just solve everything up to the point where you only need to hit the exit button, write down the solutions, then reload the checkpoint and do everything perfectly.

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Keep moving is good advice here, because your rating depends mostly on how fast you solve the puzzles.

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School can also be played from start to finish in two-player co-op, both online and in split-screen. I played the game solo, so I can't tell you how well it works in practice, but the idea itself is perfect for a game like this. Escape rooms are made to be solved with other people, and having one person read out the clues while the other works on the puzzle sounds like exactly how this game should be played. It could even ease my biggest complaint, since two heads would share the load of all those puzzles. Online play requires PlayStation Plus, but split-screen doesn't, so if you have someone next to you on the couch, I'd give it a go.

Visuals, Sounds and Performance – Tiny Heads, Big Hiccups

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School isn't a game that will wow you with its visuals. The art direction leans towards a cartoonish look rather than realism. The characters are deliberately out of proportion, with bigger necks, tiny heads and strangely shaped bodies, and although there are a lot of people on campus, each one of them looks different, which is no small feat. Some conversations also swap the 3D models for comic-style illustrated portraits, which look quite different from the rest of the game and add a nice touch.

All the students wear the same uniforms, so the teachers and more important characters are easy to recognise, and each section of the campus has its own signature look. As I said, you won't be dying from the game's beauty, but it has a certain charm, and that is all it takes to get me interested.

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Everyone wears the same uniform, yet no two students on campus look alike.

Sound design, on the other hand, could use some extra work, and while everything else about the game is mostly positive, a little more effort here would do the game a huge favour. The voiceover is very sporadic. It is not nonexistent, since major characters speak here and there, but they mostly deliver a single opening sentence, and the rest is text-based speech.

The music, once again by Doseone, is acceptable and does the job of relaxing your brain while you try to solve puzzles. When you're pressed by all sorts of dangers and time limits, the music intensifies, which is done quite well.

The performance on PlayStation 5, though, is where I had a couple of complaints. On more than a few occasions, the game crashed out of the blue, though luckily, I never lost any major progress. Frame rate drops were not an isolated incident either, so to say that my journey with Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School was a smooth ride would be a lie. I hope the devs fix these problems with upcoming patches because they are a stain on what is actually a very good game.

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Most conversations play out as text, so you'll have to imagine that hissing sound yourself.

Conclusion

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School is a very good puzzle game that simply doesn't know when to let you go home. The campus is huge and full of life, the escape rooms are well designed, and the mix of harder and easier puzzles kept me busy from start to finish. The open world may be an illusion, and the story takes a back seat, but neither is the reason you came here.

What holds it back is that it never stops. There is a puzzle around every corner, and in long sessions, that becomes tiring, so this is a game best played in smaller doses, and perhaps with a friend in split-screen to share the load. Add sporadic voiceover and the crashes and frame rate drops on PS5, and it falls short of what its puzzles deserve. Still, if you love making your brain work overtime, Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School is well worth enrolling in.