I love a good escape room, heading to an often rather innocuous door or shopfront in a less-than-prominent position in town, and then heading into a themed room that’s filled with themed puzzles and secrets to unpick. Since 2020, there’s been more than a few attempts to translate this experience to one you can enjoy at home, and between escape room envelopes, advent calendars, and online portals, it’s video games that manage to capture the tone best of all. Escape Simulator 2 is the latest, thoroughly enjoyable escape room puzzler.
There’s an immediacy to Escape Simulator 2’s puzzle rooms, as you simply appear in a space and start running around, finding puzzles and clues, and putting the pieces together. There’s no preamble, no big cutscenes and drama, you’re just chucked into the three distinct settings and themes – Dracula’s Castle, the sci-fi themed Starship EOS and the piratical The Cursed Treasure. That said, there is a throughline to each setting’s collection of four puzzle rooms, the rooms connecting well from the end of one to the start of the next.
There’s a really pleasing interactivity to all the environments, letting you pick up so many incidental items, inspecting books and scraps of paper, dragging crates across the floor, spinning and sitting around in chairs, filling your inventory with all manner of tools, and the like. Anything you grab that’s important is generally quite obvious, with giant gems, special keys and statue pieces, but they are marked with an icon just to be clear. It is important to mess around in these spaces, though, as there’s a lot of visual clues tucked away in corners and on ceilings – not to mention puzzle pieces that are hidden everywhere for pictures back in the lobby.
Oh, and this can all be played in co-op, and I played through the whole game with my better half. So much of the escape room feel comes from playing them with friends and family, where you can all go off and work on your own puzzles, compare discoveries, ask for and offer help, and you have that exact same feel in Escape Simulator 2. Right down to not really having a clue what your teammates have found and done half the time! That said, Pine Studio say that you can play with up to 8 players online, and while that might be possible, I’d say that the included rooms are going to be best with 2-4 players. You can often all look at a puzzle together, with everyone’s cursors floating around together.
So far, so similar to the original game, but Escape Simulator 2 does push in a new visual direction. There’s more darkness, there’s more detailed environments and characters compared to the more cartoony original, and it generally looks good, but there are plenty of quirks and rougher edges to the game’s presentation in general.
There’s no clipping with other people that you’re playing with – quite necessary if there’s going to be eight running around – and that leads to plenty of looking through unintentionally bald heads, or being half through someone’s head. There’s some odd or missing animations both in first and third person. Things like climbing out of a cryo bed or shifting from a ladder, or a puzzle suddenly shifting you to a completely different perspective with no explanation, and a bunch of other examples. It just takes a few seconds to figure out what’s happened, but it takes you out of the moment as you go “wait, what just happened?” I also wish that, since you can share a view of a puzzle screen, you could also share the clues you’re trying to use – these you can pin on screen, which is rather handy.
Similarly, the hints system is a little odd sometimes. It has to cater to a lot of freeform puzzling, and on the few occasions that we used it, it did generally do well – it spawns a paper diagram so you can pass this and share it with others – but there were a couple points where it wasn’t offering us any hints. That was particularly annoying at the end of the Starship EOS series, with what’s likely the penultimate puzzle being a pure puzzle with no hints. We’ll have to go back and finish this another time.
So it’s a little bit ropey in some ways, but then, what escape room isn’t? This takes you to more fantastical locations than an in person escape room could possibly hope to, and there’s a bright future for this game with both DLC from Pine Studios and a second generation of the Room Editor – I’ve not experimented with this, but over 4,000 rooms were built in the first game, and the tools here are more extensive again.
