As the first game to be published by iam8bit's new publishing division, Escape Academy arguably has a lot to prove. Developers Coin Crew are basically helping kick off a new indie publisher and have chosen to do it with an adventure game built entirely around escape rooms, with a whole secret academy devoted to them that the player finds themselves sucked into. It's a unique twist on the escape room experience, but will it pay off? A recent showcase suggests that it may, especially if the puzzle quality throughout is as consistently good as what was shown off.

The event started with a hands-off look at two rooms, one being a deliberately amateur escape room that basically serves as the tutorial and introduction, with the other being a look at a later section of the game where our new cadet has to escape a five story tower that's filling up with water. During this part, the developers stated that one of the best parts of creating a game such as this is that they can go further with escape rooms than ever before, allowing them to make experiences that couldn't be done in real-life escape rooms. In this case, not just having some sort of threat that keeps you on your toes, but allowing for more visually inventive bits like a vertical climb where every new step up is a new section of the room.

It also helps that such a scenario leads itself to inventive puzzles with impressive themes, such as...well, I kind of don't want to give anything away in greater detail, since why explain the solutions to escape rooms before you enter them? So to try and keep it as simple as possible, the goal in each section of the tower was to find a way to divert power in various, increasingly-elaborate ways in order to provide a code to open a door. But at the end, the final door couldn't be opened without a set of passwords from each prior floor, and each floor is flooded once you enter a new one, so you have to pay attention to every possible clue, lest you resort to guessing randomly. Great stuff.

After that came a hands-on portion that featured another two rooms. The first was the Headmaster's Office where you have to decode the Headmaster's name in order to escape, which has already been showcased in prior gameplay videos and is basically also still pretty much the introduction, so no reason to dwell on it much right now. The next was Lab Rat, where you have to have a computer's drivers as part of a room in order to dodge accusations of cheating and avoid expulsion. The puzzles here demonstrated the true escape room experience and the work put into everything, with even more clever brainteasers that requires one to pay heavy attention to the environment.

Once again, we get moments that couldn't be done in a real escape room, like having to coax out a rat and pick it up in order to place it in a cage, a particularly bizarre yet welcome section that requires more physical movement from the player as they move around pressure plates while trying to properly notice what's happening on a set of screens, and a brilliant, even more cerebral final section that involved having to translate color combinations into numbers. The puzzle-loving part of me was over the moon with how Coin Crew had come up with all of these imagine escape rooms, and how they flowed superbly. My only complaint was that I had to use a controller at the time, which was fine, but a mouse and keyboard feels like it would provide better precision for rooms where time is of the essence. Though there was one other concern, which I didn't consider until recalling one certain part of the event...

During a Q&A after the initial gameplay session was showcased to an audience, someone asked the question of whether or not Escape Academy would allow for any user-created content, some way to make their own escape rooms and whatnot. The team said that there were no plans at the moment. But while no title was mentioned, I had a bit of an idea what they might have been referring to: Escape Simulator. Released in October of last year by Pine Studio, Escape Simulator, as the title says, is another game allowing players to experience virtual escape rooms, and was also crafted with the help of actual escape room experts. Over the past few months, it ended up becoming a sleeper hit, eventually selling over a million copies so far.

But one of Escape Simulator's biggest strengths is its level editor, a set of tools allows players to craft their own unique escape rooms, something that has led to not only a thriving little community in the game, but something that has provided a major source of replayability alongside the twenty escape rooms offered, as my own fifteen-plus hours in the game can attest to (it also helps that a couple of official free rooms have been added over time, and the first paid DLC arrives next month). Escape Academy, in comparison, only has about twelve rooms and seven or so hours of length. It still looks impressive, but can it scratch the same itch for a substantial amount of time?

Of course, it helps that Escape Academy has a full narrative story and a full cast of characters interacting with you in and between the rooms, such as the boisterous handyman Jeb, or the snarky AI Quanty, and from what what shown and experienced, they come across as a rather fun lot. And the academy itself seems like it should be fascinating to explore (and is colorful as well), especially if it delves deeper into its history. So there just might be enough in this area along to help give Escape Academy an edge, and thus make sure that we all get to experience even more expertly-crafted, incredibly fun escape rooms with different angles and new tricks up their sleeve (and in hindsight, the idea that the two games should compete is ludicrous).

Overall, Escape Academy seems not only like a terrific game of iam8bit's first publishing outing, but just an amazing game in general, especially for lovers of puzzlers, escape rooms, adventure games and more. But you can test it out for yourself tomorrow and come to your own conclusion, when a demo of Escape Academy will be available as a part of Steam's Cerebral Puzzle Showcase from May 19 to June 23, before coming out on June 28 for PC, Xbox and PlayStation platforms.