Escape room puzzle game Escape Academy launches today

Everybody adapted differently to the pandemic. Coin Crew Games developers realized that they had to move their focus away from traditional arcade games and escape rooms. They needed to find a way to make the most of their talents, without requiring players to actually be present in the game. This is the result. Escape AcademyThe launch of, Thursday

Coin Crew was founded in 2018 with the stated goal of “bringing people together to play.” Escape AcademyThis virtual escape room offers a way to achieve this goal. It takes players to the game’s titular school, where they are taught unique puzzle challenges. As players move from one puzzle to the next, water floods the tower. Each level’s ladder to the next floor is blocked by a password revealed by puzzles in escape rooms. The game’s objective is to learn, solve and escape.

“A game should be something that you can do with a friend or with a spouse or with family, an activity that you can do to spend time together,” Mike Salyh, co-founder of Coin Crew, told me in an interview. “The game should be fun, but it should really facilitate a good interaction between people. To me, solving a puzzle is the ultimate achievement. I give high fives to people who solve it. And whenever I see people fail to solve a puzzle, that’s when I break out my notebook and I start furiously trying to fix it.”

High-fiving is hard when you’re sequestered in your home, but Escape Academy is nevertheless highly tailored for social gameplay, whether you’re on the couch next to your partner or thousands of miles away. The game’s local and online co-op experiences are identical; either way, you see your teammate’s screen at all times. It takes some time to get used to the vertical splitscreen. But the benefits of being able to see everything your partner sees, like clues on the other side of the room or notes they’ve pinned to their side of the screen, outweigh any momentary befuddlement players might feel.

Image: Coin Crew Games/iam8bit/Skybound Games

A school for escape-room enthusiasts was born out of the desire for different environments to place their puzzles. Escape Academy’s creators say.

“The more distinct environments we could create, the more cool puzzles we would be able to put in them, because environments really inform the puzzles,” Salyh said. “You can do different puzzles in a greenhouse than you can do in a tower filling with water than you can do in a computer lab. We wanted to be able to play in a wide range of settings. When brainstorming, we came up with settings that could allow us to transport the player through multiple settings in one story.

“We came up with the idea of a school where the different professors are creating challenges for you to solve, which also solves another big problem in puzzle games,” he continued. “It’s like, why are there all these puzzles here? Each puzzle is unique because it has its creator. You don’t, like, trip and create a combination lock. There’s got to be some mastermind behind it [in the lore].”

“And we may or may not have been watching a certain superhero anime at the time,” he added, causing both he and his Coin Crew co-founder, Wyatt Bushnell, to burst into laughter. Yes, Nolan Bushnell was the founder of Chuck E. Cheese and Atari.

I had a chat with Salyh, Bushnell and discussed various puzzle games, and those with puzzles, during my conversation. The WitnessIt does virtually no hand-holding TunicThe instruction manual is written in another language and can be found at. Uncharted, whose puzzles are dead simple because they aren’t the main focus of the game. Bushnell and Salyh both love those puzzles, but they disagree with the idea of balancing them in. Escape AcademyNumerous challenges were encountered.

“It’s kind of a weird game to balance, because no puzzle gets repeated,” Bushnell said. “Every puzzle is totally unique in the experience. Every person is going to find different puzzles challenging, and different puzzles really easy, based on whatever your personal life experience is.”

“I think all of our puzzles are pretty difficult in a vacuum,” he continued. “A fun puzzle is a very hard puzzle that you have the tools to solve.”

Image: Coin Crew Games/iam8bit/Skybound Games

You will find clues throughout the level of the flooding tower. They range from hidden codes with translation keys and physical objects to place in order to make letters and numbers. Each puzzle is indeed different, and each room felt solvable once we’d explored that floor of the tower, picking up tools and items and discovering which objects in the environment could be interacted with. A few surprises were found in every room. For example, shelves of junk filled with useless stuff that didn’t have anything to do the puzzle. (Clicking on these generally results in some flavor text like “Look at all this useless junk!” that lets you know it isn’t part of the puzzle.)

“We put a lot of groups through it and kind of see, is this fun hard or is this un-fun hard?” Salyh said. “In general, we want players to win, but we want them to maybe run out of time a couple of times.”

The game also features a built-in hint system, because the developers didn’t want you to have to pause the game and Google anything. Just like you’d raise your hand to get help in an escape room situation, you can also press a button and receive a hint at any given time. And the hints are tailored to each puzzle, a result of Coin Crew’s exhaustive playtesting practices. Salyh stated that they had four groups of puzzle-solvers play weekly over the course of a year. A group of testers would get stuck and ask for a hint. The designers then took notes and made in-game suggestions. That way, you never have to leave the game world, and you don’t feel like you’re cheating by looking something up.

“I think that’s the really wonderful thing about puzzle games,” Salyh said. “When you play it, you get this, at first, kind of daunting, like, ‘Oh my god, can I ever crack this?’ And then when you solve it, you feel like a genius.” They want Escape Academy Players to win and feel that sensation.

Bushnell concurred.

“My favorite part about location-based entertainment was being able to like — this sounds very cheesy and a little douchey — but I really loved the being able to see a group of people playing an arcade game or an escape room, and it’s like, you know you’re going to be what they talk about at dinner that night,” he said. “You kind of get to see a memory get made. And I was a little afraid that we wouldn’t get that with digital. The demo was launched for Cerebral Puzzle Showcase. [on Steam], and being able to see people screening the demo or let’s plays of the demo, and getting to see people interact with puzzles without us there and having fun, that definitely scratched that itch.”

Escape AcademyIt is compatible with PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC.