Escape Academy 2 Review: Brilliant Puzzles, Exhausting Campus

The first Escape Academy was a tidy idea executed well: a school for escape artists, one handcrafted room after another, two-player co-op, done in six hours. Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School keeps the rooms and wraps them in what Coin Crew Games calls the first open-world escape room game. It launched on 5 November 2026 on PC (Steam, Epic, Microsoft Store), PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, is on Game Pass from day one, and costs 16.99 euros on Steam with a 15 percent launch discount (14.44 euros) until 19 November. There is also a free demo.

The rooms are the best the series has had

Let me be clear about the good part, because it is very good. The escape rooms themselves are more varied, more layered and funnier than anything in the first game or its DLC. Clues are spread across the environment rather than sitting on one table, several rooms chain three or four puzzle types into one escalating sequence, and the writing lands most of its jokes. The returning cast is a pleasure, the new No-Timer mode lets you solve at your own pace, and if you play on the timer the pressure is exactly right: tight enough to make you argue with your partner, loose enough that you rarely fail unfairly.

Co-op, online or split-screen, is still the way to play. Solo is possible and the timer does not adjust, so you are simply doing two people's work.

The campus is where the time goes

The open campus is the headline feature and my biggest problem. It is large, lively and nicely styled, and it is full of side quests, collectibles and student chatter that pad the campaign to roughly twenty hours. But there is no map. You navigate by signposts and memory, you buy ziplines to cut the walking, and you hold the stick to sprint because there is no toggle. After ten hours I was spending as much time commuting between rooms as solving them. The first game's menu of rooms was a feature, not a limitation, and this sequel did not need to prove otherwise.

Technically it is rough at launch. Inside the rooms it is fine; out on campus I saw frame drops, a couple of multi-second freezes and one hard crash on PC, and PS5 reports are similar. A day-one patch is promised. The voiceover is also inconsistent: some scenes are fully acted, a lot of dialogue is plain text, and the campus announcements are mixed far too loud.

Who is it for?

Anyone with a puzzle partner and a Game Pass subscription should install it tonight; it costs nothing extra and the rooms alone are worth the evenings. If you are paying full price to play solo, know that you are getting twenty hours of which maybe twelve are the part you actually want.

Verdict

Escape Academy 2 has the finest escape rooms I have played in a video game, and it makes me walk a long way between them. Puzzle fatigue is real, the campus is undercooked and the launch build needs its patch. Still, the moments inside the rooms are so good that I forgive a lot.

Score: 7/10

Image: Hudson Bloom / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Escape_Room_-_%22The_Expedition%22_(Escape_Quest_Bethesda).jpg