I’ve found my happy place! The Escape Simulator is a first-person simulation of escape rooms, built in 3D with realistic physics. In a way that almost all room-escape video games aren’t, it’s a simulation of attending a real-world escape room. Except when it’s in space. I’ll clarify. I love throwaway room escape games, with their stupid puzzles, silly storylines, and strange obsession with chucking away every useful tool after one use. I love the good ones even more, and Rusty Lake’s Cube series is one of the best. All of these aren’t like playing in an escape room.
Our relative inaccessibility to space travel makes Escape Simulator’s huge variety of incredibly detailed rooms delightfully impossible to recreate. There’s an office setting, a posh country mansion, and even a spaceship. It’s the same thing: you’re in a room, there’s a lot of stuff, and you need to solve all the puzzles in it. First-person perspective and realistic physics make this ransacking all the better. It lets you pull heavy boxes off shelves, drag office chairs out of the way, and just make a mess. Instead, you can approach things methodically, be neat and tidy, and even throw out things you don’t need.
You take a moment to get your bearings in every new room, look around all four walls, then start looting. You’ll see notes, post-its, weird patterns on the walls, keys hidden behind plant pots, and so on. Start assembling combinations for padlocks, passwords, and codes by hitting Space and inspecting things in 3D. Each room (except one) has a 15-minute timer, but it’s only for trophies. While I finished a bunch of rooms in time, I found things much more relaxing in others once I realised I wasn’t going to make it and took my time. A couple of bonus rooms are at the end of the 22 rooms.
If you play them in order, there’s a gentle curve of difficulty. After that, you can either play others’ rooms or jump into the room creator tool. A steampunk-themed DLC pack is coming in June, with larger rooms. There’ll be co-op too, all aboard an airship, trying to escape before it all goes kablooie. As these are bigger levels, the four new rooms should last four hours. In spite of being incredibly well-received on Steam, the game hasn’t gotten much press coverage. It’s kept me happy all week. There’s even a co-op mode, so you can play with your friends in these escape rooms. On my own, Escape Simulator makes me feel like I’m playing a real-world escape room, one spaceship aside, keeping things realistic. I can’t wait for that DLC.
