Escape Simulator 2 review

• Reviews by Sean Parker
• Published:

Brand new devious puzzle rooms for groups to lose themselves in, better looking and harder than ever, with the promise of more to come

Escape rooms are often pitched to first-timers as “adventure games, but IRL.” While the narratives tend to be slim (or nonexistent), the experience of combing through a real space for clues, cracking cryptic puzzles, and being immersed in detailed artistry can certainly feel like the closest thing to being physically swept up into a point-and-click world.

Pine Studio’s Escape Simulator went full circle in 2021, taking inspiration from real-world escape room design to offer gamers a compelling and fairly authentic virtual alternative – at a price much cheaper than a standard ticket, to boot! Arriving at a time when many escape rooms had shut down due to the global pandemic, it offered a generous helping of levels in a variety of classic themes (like Victorian manors, Egyptian pyramids, and high-tech offices), plus the ability to make your own rooms to share with the community. Four years later, after a long tail of post-launch support and varied DLC packs, its developer is back at it again with a full-blown sequel in Escape Simulator 2.

I really, really enjoyed Escape Simulator, but I didn’t see this one coming. The first was a hit, sure, but I never thought it needed a full-on sequel – it seemed like an endless content machine that was ripe to keep exploring with expansions and community-made levels. Didn’t it already have a great foundation? Would this just end up being a too-soon double dip?

Thankfully not. With quite a bit of added functionality and a radically different visual style that favors abundantly detailed realism over the first game’s charming cartoon vibes, Escape Simulator 2 carves out its own distinct identity without making the original feel obsolete. In fact, Pine has already promised to continue releasing content for ES1 in tandem with DLC for ES2, an uncommon move for most studios, and an undeniable win for fans of either game.

The new look is what immediately sets this one apart. The sequel’s more realistic graphics are just plain terrific. Rooms are also significantly larger and more densely packed, with much more micro detail and the ability to change floors. Yes, there’s a whole new axis, where staircases and ladders now function! While the added scope and visual density can sometimes result in clues getting lost in the sheer amount of environment detail, it was a tradeoff I was happy to make for the huge boost to immersion.

It also feels like the difficulty of the built-in rooms has been way, way upped over the original’s challenge level. Escape Simulator 2 is a great option for players who know what to expect with escape room gameplay, because even from the get-go, it doesn’t seem particularly newbie-friendly when played solo. The very first level felt surprisingly hard, and I actually ran out the 45-minute timer (which carries no penalty, just optional bragging rights) because I’d overlooked something devilishly hidden in plain sight. The opening puzzles really set the tone that this game isn't messing around… and oh, it only gets trickier from there.

The controls are fairly simple and essentially match the original game. It’s all in first-person, with standard WASD movement, an option to run (which is never required, but definitely saves time during numerous back-and-forths) and a key for crouching, which is needed during the rare times that you have to enter small passages and tunnels. A mouse click interacts with mechanisms or picks up items, which can then be added to your inventory or inspected in a fully rotatable close-up view. Holding down a mouse click lets you throw whatever you’re holding, which is pretty much just for fun, but quite nice when you need to let some frustration out (or chuck an object at a fellow player’s head – more on that later).

Escape Simulator 2 comes with three main sets of levels: a Transylvanian castle, a far-future space station, and a classically swashbuckling “Golden age of piracy” seafaring adventure. Each level set has four different rooms, and you can jump around to play the rooms in whatever order you choose. While the default order probably makes the most sense, there’s so little in the way of a narrative that you won’t get tripped up by doing them out of sequence.

The castle levels are very effective at building a genuinely unsettling atmosphere, where sometimes advancing through puzzles will even trigger borderline jump scare moments as the lighting quite dramatically changes with fitting sound cues. It’s not quite a horror experience, but you can expect some goosebumps traversing these spooky rooms.

While well designed, I wasn’t as big on the space station environments, where the puzzles got a bit burdened with convoluted ship systems maintenance and deciphering esoteric alien technology. But I really enjoyed the pirate levels, which start us off in a fantastically swashbuckling-themed tavern before thrusting you into an epic sea battle against a kraken, then conclude with an island expedition to a temple which, of course, houses highly cursed treasure. All of the levels have a terrific art style – and a quality musical score that never draws your focus away from the puzzling, but certainly adds a great mood.

Quite often, the puzzles in the official levels run the gamut from being very clever (but fair) to feeling… maybe a bit too brutal. There might be a few too many that just didn’t seem adequately clued for a gamer like me. I noticed this particularly in the space campaign, but each level set has its offenders.

Escape Simulator 2

Genre:	Fantasy, Mystery, Science Fiction
Presentation:	Realtime 3D
Theme:	Monsters, Other worlds/dimensions, Pirates, Team-up
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Photorealism
Gameplay:	Co-op, Puzzle
Control:	Direct Control

There’s a hint system that works similarly to the first game’s, only instead of a hint-dispensing button existing within the level (which could easily be mistaken as part of the room's puzzles), now you simply bring up the pause menu, where a nice big button tells you to click it to get a push in the right direction. Doing so will send you back into the game, now with a piece of paper in your hands with an (often cryptic) illustrated nudge for one of the puzzles you haven't yet cracked.

My only big gripe with the hint system is that sometimes it's a bit too subtle for its own good, particularly for the really nasty challenges. It offers visual clues only – no text, which can sometimes lead to the hints not feeling clear enough. And as a smaller issue, the game doesn’t always do the best job of tracking how much progress you’ve made within a puzzle, so when it can't tell, it doles out clues for the whole puzzle in order, starting from the beginning. If you get to the very end of a long puzzle before needing a hint, it's a bit of a drag to have to keep going to the pause menu to click the "Request Hint" button up to nine times to get the clue you’ve been needing the whole time.

There’s one other form of very helpful assistance available, though: your fellow adventurers! Escape Simulator 2 can be fully enjoyed by yourself, but the entire game is designed for multiplayer every step of the way, letting you team up online with as many as seven other players to crush through puzzles and cause a bit of mayhem. This is where the game really shines.

More than once, a room that would have been frustrating ended up staying fun thanks to the opportunity to collectively put my group’s heads together, whereas alone we might have remained stumped for far longer. The game even has some optional challenges in multiplayer mode, sometimes starting players off isolated from each other and requiring them to pool their clues together to open locked doors and reunite as a group.

The sweet spot in multiplayer seems to be 2-4 players, but good communication is key to getting the most out of it. The main drawback of multiplayer is that each player is likely to miss out on some aspects of the puzzles. There’s only so many people that can contribute to a task at a time, so players will often split up and tackle puzzles in tandem. But while I missed out on understanding some of the underlying logic of the puzzles that my teammates solved without me, I really didn’t mind this too much – and if it had bothered me, I could have always just gone back in for a replay of the room.

You don’t have to be great at solving puzzles to have a good time with a group. In multiplayer, the true joy comes from the social aspect of progressing as a team, not from any needless pressure to be the most useful person in the room. But, if you're lucky enough to be the one to finally notice a critical clue that's been stumping everyone for ages and save the day, that’s a heck of a rewarding feeling.

Beyond four players, things can get progressively messier. A full party of eight was rather chaotic, but certainly reflected my own experience of playing with that many friends in a real-life escape room, so it’s hard to fault the game for being TOO accurate. Surprisingly enough, while also optimized for 2-4 players, the original Escape Simulator actually let you play with a party of ten – which I never tried but feels like way too much for just about anything in that game – so a slight reduction in the player cap doesn’t even register as an issue.

Escape Simulator 2’s official content is a little sparse at the moment, but so was the first game’s once upon a time – and now that one’s jam-packed with extra free levels and DLC additions. While we wait for the same to inevitably happen with the sequel, there’s already a free Christmas-themed level that was added post-launch, and it’s easily one of my favorite rooms of the series: a fully decorated ground floor of a charming home, complete with model train tracks running around up high. In a great touch, you can even look out the windows into your next-door neighbor’s house, where it seems like Kevin McCallister is pulling off Home Alone's classic mannequin-based dinner party trick. Instead of discovering a way out of the house, the objective is to find everything needed to set the dinner table for the whole family. It’s a fun and suitably Christmassy objective, even though my team’s frantic search so thoroughly trashed the place by the end that I think the festivities would need to wait until at least after New Year's.

Despite a slimmer set of official levels than the first Escape Simulator currently offers, you aren’t limited to waiting for Pine Studio to make more content. Escape Simulator 2 also represents a massive upgrade over the first game’s Room Editor, where players can create and share their own levels. Helpfully, the developers have created a very detailed tutorial series on YouTube to help builders come to grips with the system, and without it, I’d have been pretty lost. The amount of power in the editor is vast, and its complexity is frankly quite intimidating. There’s so much more freedom to build rooms this time around than what the original game could have ever supported.

I tried quite a few community-made rooms and had my fun with them, but struggled to find many that held up to my favorites from the original. However, we’re still in the early stages of this game’s lifetime. Already there's some rather novel concepts coming out, and plenty of reason to believe the offerings could get just as interesting and diverse as the best levels created for the first game (if not more so), once there’s been more time for players to get comfortable with the new system. But one beneficial little addition to community-made rooms that’s already very noticeable is that they now have the ability to include step-by-step hints for puzzles available from the pause menu, rather than hoping someone writes a guide on the level’s Steam Workshop page.

Escape Simulator 2 has a couple other quality-of-life features that improve upon the experience. If you leave the game in the middle of a room (official or community-made), it'll save all your progress automatically, no save slots required. When loading up a room you've already begun, the game asks if you'd like to restart the level or continue where you left off, which is elegant and simple, and all a game like this needs when each level stands alone.

And speaking of elegant, let’s close with a special mention of the game’s lobby. Prior to loading up a room, whether solo or in multiplayer, Escape Simulator 2 has a cozy, dedicated lounge area that you physically navigate to access various features (like picking up a phone to invite friends via Steam, or opening a portal to view the list of levels). The developers could have easily skipped all this fun presentation and handled it with a basic menu, but went the extra mile instead. There’s a functioning chessboard for playing against a friend, tea and cookies you can nosh on, and jigsaw puzzles to assemble (using the various puzzle piece “tokens” you’ve collected throughout the game, which are hidden all over the rooms). There’s also a mirror that opens a character customizer for how you’ll appear to your teammates, from which you can pick a full rainbow of skin tones and hair colors, six hair styles, and a few wardrobe choices that stylistically match the different settings (like buccaneer garb or spacesuits).

One last feature of the lobby unlocks a bunch of additional puzzle content: a large glowing stone that whisks you into a bonus menu of challenges called “Darkest Puzzles,” which become available with each official room you conquer. The Darkest Puzzles take a concept you’ve already encountered in the main rooms and tweak the scope and puzzle design to the point of sheer sadism. I managed to beat one of them, and had a torturous time trying (and failing) to beat a dozen more. I quickly learned these were not for me, but for people who relish mental punishment, you’re in luck.

Final Verdict

I’m so glad to be proven wrong regarding my doubts of whether we needed this, as Escape Simulator 2 sports some really massive upgrades, both visually and under-the-hood, that make it a highly worthy sequel. While not every puzzle in the base game is a winner, there’s a plethora that soar – and it’s some of the most fun you can have with friends in the whole adventure genre. Add in the promise of plenty more rooms on the way (both from Pine Studio themselves and players across the world), and you’ve got yourself a heck of a puzzle package.

Sean and friends played Escape Simulator 2 on PC using review codes provided by the game's publisher.

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