Escape Simulator 2 Review – I Want To Break Free

Do you love escape rooms? Have you ever lamented not being able to complete an escape room from the comfort of your own home? Well, you can with the Escape Simulator series, which aims to simulate the escape room experience which you can play alone or with up to eight friends.

Pine Studio’s Escape Simulator 2 is more mature, immersive and graphically impressive than its predecessor. The rooms feel more in-depth, with more steps and puzzles to complete in order to unlock further sections of each area and complete the overall goal to escape. It maintains that interactivity that made the first Escape Simulator game feel realistically immersive as an escape room simulation; you can drag furniture around, pull out books from a book shelf and look under pots for keys – just as you can do in real life escape rooms!

While Escape Simulator 2 can be played solo, and works very well this way albeit far more challenging to complete these puzzles on your own, it’s a more enjoyable experience when played with a friend. I played through the game with one other person, and while it is playable with up to eight players, I can see more than four being too much of a crowd.

Split into three locations, Escape Simulator 2 offers enough variety in its themes to keep it interesting throughout, with each location having three rooms to solve and escape from. Dracula’s Castle is the game’s gothic opening, taking place in the castle’s courtyard to begin with, the players needing to break into the castle to uncover its secrets. Starship EOS is the sci-fi themed location, taking place on a space vessel that has crash landed, and the player crew has to use its futuristic technology to get the ship’s functions back online. And then The Cursed Treasure is the final pirate-themed level.

Having currently nine rooms in total to escape from, split between the three locations and each taking up to an hour or longer to complete, Escape Simulator 2 offers plenty of content in its current state, with a playtime of around 10 hours. The original game was updated over the years with new DLC rooms, which I expect will also happen with its sequel which is something I look forward to.

With ten hours of content, I was surprised that each puzzle felt creative and unique. At no point during my playthrough did I feel like the developers were reusing content or that certain mechanics were becoming overused. It helps that the themes of each location are wholly different to one another, as this meant the puzzles varied widely across the locations, with Dracula’s Castle and The Cursed Treasure focusing more on finding keys and working out physical puzzles, whereas Starship EOS was more digital and involved a lot of keycode-finding.

The rooms can feel overwhelming at first, especially when starting a new location and adjusting to the room layout and sudden abundance of things to unlock. However, you will eventually start to see a pattern in the information available and start to work out what you need to work on first. There is a hint system, however the puzzles are usually pretty self explanatory and any that weren’t I was able to work out by throwing ideas around with the friend I was playing with. I didn’t even need to touch the hint system until around midway through the game as a last resort. And even then, it slowly unveils slight clues rather than outright giving you the answer, still giving the player that satisfaction of having solved the puzzle even if they were given a pointer.

The UI feels intuitive, with the player being able to pin literature to their screen so they don’t have to keep pulling out of the puzzle interaction screen to check back on a book or note. When zooming in on an item, your friend can also share your zoomed in view so you can both take a look and interact with an object or puzzle together.

Where the clever UI elements end is with the puzzles that can only be solved by one person. This is usually because you need to be using a specific object to see something that other players can’t share your view of, such as a lens revealing markings on the wall or a forklift truck which lifts the player up to a puzzle that’s placed up high. These are extremely collaboration-unfriendly, and unfortunately occur more often than I would like and usually when there are no other puzzles that your accompanying friends can solve while you’re occupied with the one they can’t help with. On a few occasions, I or my friend ended up sharing multiple screenshots with each other of what we were seeing so that we could assist each other and keep that collaborative element that the game otherwise does really well. Unfortunately the alternative is that your friend has to awkwardly hang around and wait for you to finish with the puzzle before you can progress onto the next one together.

That being said, Escape Simulator 2 still succeeds in doing what every great puzzle game should do and that’s making the player feel like a genius. While it does challenge you and there will be times where you and your friend may feel like you’re completely stuck on a puzzle, this only makes the satisfaction of having finally solved it feel greater. While it is still quite glitchy here and there, especially with character model animations, and there are some puzzles that are poorly designed for a team, Escape Simulator 2 as an overall package is a huge improvement on its predecessor and a must-play for puzzle game fans.

Jess reviewed Escape Simulator 2 on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.