Escape Academy

This game answered a question I didn't know I had, which was, "What kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ would result if you designed a game the same way you'd design a physical space?" It was interesting for all the wrong reasons. The main problem with this game is it's designed like a physical escape room. Trying to explain what that means is tricky. A list: 1. A timer counting down constantly, a thing which... like, in physical escape rooms, you can't have a party there for 8 hours. Just like, as a business. But also, as physical humans in a group, running around a physical space frantically for an hour is fun. When you remove the parts where you're with your friends and touching physical items and the rooms are small and you have something to do later so you can't stay all day, the timer is just annoying. The way people engage with time in media versus real life is just different -- people might put a game down for a while and come back to it, or want to take their time to think through logic puzzles, or try a bunch of weird solutions that are probably wrong before doing what they're supposed to do, or any number of things that make an artificial time limit just incredibly annoying. If you're like me, it also creates a weird amount of anxiety, which again, desireable in a physical scenario to get the adrenaline pumping, really unpleasant in a digital one. 2. So many useless menus and interfaces. Like, I can't believe I have to spell this out, but in real life you can look at a bunch of screens all at once, or just by slightly moving your head around. In a game, having to constant select the screen I want to see, then zoom in, then zoom in again on a clue -- there were so many insane layers of interaction you constantly had to navigate in and out of. It was so, so annoying. 3. Bad demarcation of interactables and important items. The was so much junk cluttering every scenario, and there was no way to know if any of it mattered or would ever matter, because sometimes you'd get a puzzle and sometimes you'd get flavour text and sometimes something that had seeemed like flavour text would later turn out to be interactable and sometimes it wouldn't... god it was awful. Is something in that bin or is that a decorative bin? Who knows! You can't reach it anyway because the rooms are designed like physical spaces, so you will never find out. There just shouldn't have been flavour text during the actual levels, not least because ACCIDENTALLY CLICKING IT WHILE THE CLOCK WAS RUNNING WAS A HORRIBLE FEELING. I cannot explain how infuriating this was. 4. No awareness of what the game was or wasn't teaching the player to do. This was a huge problem. Again, escape rooms in like, life, are designed to be one-offs -- this isn't something you have to think about when designing them. But the language of game design is also a form of back-and-forth communication with the player, and if you're not paying attention to what you're saying to them, you run into real problems. To give you an example of what I mean, at once point in like the third level you see a sequence, "🦴-b dddddd" that is the password to a computer. Up until that point, all letter sequences like this had been number strings and math problems. I spent so. long. scraping that stupid-ass room trying to find some indication of what number '🦴, b, and d' were equal to while the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clock was ticking. It was one of the most frustrating and infuriating experiences I've ever had in a video game. I finally opened the hint screen, and the first hint was "What happens if you remove the letter b from the word 'bone'?" and my brain immediately went 'Jesus ♥♥♥♥, it's 160." I subsequently went on the forums to see that many, many other people were furious about this puzzle, and the dev said it was the biggest complaint by far, but they didn't understand why WHICH IS INSANE ON ITS OWN, but the reason why is actually really simple. The game had strongly indicated through prior levels that we should think in terms of equations and single-substitution alphanumeric codes, but there was literally no other rebus, or any indication to the player that they might expect a rebus. The problem is the game had trained the player incorrectly, because it wasn't thinking about its own design holistically. It doesn't shock me that no one had been able to articulate this to the dev, but it is astounding to me the dev has thought so little about the fundamentals of game design that they haven't been able to figure this out on their own. But hey, you see this kind of thing in physical escape rooms all the time, right??? These were just the worst instances, but the problem was persistent, and once I figured out why the issues were there, they just kind of kept cropping up. The other issue with the game, and the reason I ultimately DNFed it (as curious as I was about the terrible choices it would make), was that it made me wildly motion sick. It had something to do with the camera's lateral movement -- it happened most when I would move to one side but face a different direction when I was moving. And it was bad and sudden -- at one point I was mostly fine and then literally threw the Steam Switch down and sat up because I genuinely thought I might puke and I was ready to run to the bathroom. I saw multiple people commenting about severe motion sickness in the Steam forums, so it wasn't just me (although admittedly I'm really sensitive); fiddling with the settings did nothing to help, I would still get hit with these sudden waves of nausea during lateral movement. Like I said, I'm sensitive, but I've never had anything like this happen before, where it would go from like 2 to 100 instantly, multiple times across multiple playthroughs. I'm not really sure what to attribute this to other than a lack of sufficient playtesting. The other problem the game had was a really weird tone problem. It couldn't seem to decide if it wanted to be serious or not, and IMO not leaning into how bizarre its premise is was a huge missed opportunity. I mean, the protagonist literally gets kidnapped and everyone acts like this is normal? I genuinely don't understand why this wasn't written like, say, Kraken Academy or The Procession to Cavalry. Taking cues from a Japanese absurdist ethos like Katamari would also have worked. This was begging to be some kind of funny, surrealistic experience but seemed afraid of the wackiness of its own premise, wanting instead to be gritty realism. This was a bad choice, and took away something that could have made the game really stand out. I never knew what I was expected to be feeling from scene to scene, or whether something was meant to be like... funny, in a cheesy way? or I was supposed to be taking it seriously. The vibes were off, as the kids say.