Probably the biggest disappointment with Escape Academy was that it ended. When you’re on a roll of solving puzzles against the clock, you don’t want someone to tell you that the gig’s over. So, you can imagine how chuffed we were when DLC dropped with five more escape rooms. We grabbed a notepad and pen, and got stuck in.
First, the logistical stuff. You can play Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island even if you haven’t completed the main campaign, but we’d advise that you don’t. The story picks up from the main game’s final moments, and you’d be spoiling some of its surprises. Plus, the puzzles here are spiky in difficulty terms, so you might want to get some easier ones under your belt first.
It all starts with a holiday. You deserve it, after all, having not only graduated but – minor spoilers – saved the entire Escape Academy from evil clutches too. Your holiday-mates could have been better-chosen however, as jetting off with the faculty of Escape Academy was only going to lead to trouble. You’re on a plane to some sun, sand and puzzles, before you get shot down by the dastardly Anti-Escapers.
The first escape room takes place within that crashing plane, and it’s our favourite of the five. There’s something about an escape room taking place mid-air that made us feel like Liam Neeson, and it adds an air of drama and uniqueness that the other escape rooms could have done with.
We could tell you more about the puzzles, but we’d be breaking an unspoken escape room code. The first rule of an escape room is you don’t talk about anything in the escape room. But know that these puzzles are just as intuitive, fun and fiendish as they are in the main game proper. There is no dip in quality at all.
From the crashing plane, the next step is a tiki bar, which forms our second favourite of the five rooms. Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island really gets the best ones out of the way first. This is a jolly and pressure-free jaunt through a closed bar, and it contains our favourite puzzle in the entire Escape from Anti-Escape Island DLC. Oh, the ‘eureka!’ when we spotted something on a wall. You could have heard it a few doors down.
From there, things get thematically samey. There’s a lot of machinery, corporate offices and industrial backrooms, as you infiltrate the Anti-Escapers. It’s the biggest failing of Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island: it can’t maintain the freewheeling invention of the first two rooms. The puzzles are fine, but the sheer number of vents and crates gets numbing.
The difficulty steepens pretty quickly. A switch-flipping puzzle in the third room had us tearing out clumps of hair, while a Minesweeper-a-like had us questioning our sanity. We exceeded the given time on three of the five escape rooms, which was about the same as the entire main campaign combined. If you felt Escape Academy was on the easy side, then you asked for it: this has three rooms that are as diabolical as any that the original had to offer.
Allow us to have some small gripes about the puzzles, which is difficult when you don’t want to reveal too much. We’d say that a couple of them are on the inelegant side. The Minesweeper one, in particular, is clumsy. It imagines what the Microsoft favourite would be like if you were standing in the middle of it. But you need precision and overview for a Minesweeper to work, which are two things you definitely don’t have. And we are willing to put money on the Minesweeper puzzle being incorrect, of all things. A ‘1’ is surrounded by two mines, which is absolute blasphemy.
What we also liked about Escape Academy was that the puzzles were locks that just needed your solution as a key. This meant that the Hint system could always help you out: it would just point to the location of the key. But in Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island, there are several puzzles that are more like games. The switch-flipping puzzle and the Minesweeper are good examples: you can know what you have to do, but you still have to tinker with it to complete it. This makes the Hint system useless, as knowing what to do isn’t the problem. It also means that, if the game itself is too difficult, Escape Academy no longer has a means to help you. It’s very possible to get completely and impossibly stuck, and no Hint will help.
Still, we got through. Sometimes by luck, other times by a touch of judgment. And we wanted to, because – by golly – some of the puzzles were brilliant and we just wanted to see what the game would throw up next. An inspired one had us stealing identity cards from henchmen, without actually knowing their identities, and then working it out via an elaborate logic puzzle. Another had us doing some lightweight programming, getting a claw to pick up treasures. The good puzzles vastly outweighed the fiddly or overly difficult ones, and we occasionally felt like Houdini with a splash of Sherlock Holmes. Nothing could stop us.
If Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island is anything to go by, then we’re in for a treat with further DLC drops. It’s very much more of the same, but that same has been twisted into fiendish shapes and the stabilisers have been kicked off. You should see the state of the notebook that we used for the puzzles. It’s like the Zodiac Killer sent us some light reading.
You can buy Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island from the Xbox Store
