Adventure · 2021 · Pine Studio · online
Escape Simulator
Escape rooms for the living room: pull out drawers, smash pots, find the way out.
What it is about
The two of you stand in a locked room — a tomb, a laboratory, a library — and are meant to get out. You may handle everything: pull out drawers, turn books over, shift furniture and, when nothing else helps, smash pots against the wall.
The puzzles build on each other. A number on the wall matches a lock two rooms away; a picture only makes sense once you look at it from the right corner. None of it requires outside knowledge.
With two it pays to split up: one searches the shelves, one fiddles with the lock. After the included rooms you carry on in the Workshop, where other players have built their own — with everything that implies, in both directions.
Our verdict for couples
One room, two people and roughly forty objects that can be picked up, turned and smashed. You search it at the same time, and that is the real difference from a physical escape room: nobody has to wait for the other to finish looking. There is no clock, no failing and nothing that asks for reflexes — the only thing you can lose here is time, and time is the point. The rooms that come with it are done after a few evenings; after that the workshop keeps supplying more, free and of varying care.
Pros
- No time limit and no failing
- Thousands of free rooms from the Workshop
- Playable across platforms
Cons
- The included rooms are solved quickly
- Workshop rooms vary in quality
- No local co-op
Suitable from
Casual
- Conflict potential
- Harmonious
- Cosiness
- Very cosy
- When you can stop
- After 30–45 minutes
- How long it lasts
- 5–15 hours
What other co-op fans say
Two things come up again and again in the community: that the puzzles are fair — solvable from what is in the room, without leaps of logic — and that it works better with two than alone. Several write that it comes close to the feeling of a real escape room at a fraction of the price. The recurring objection concerns the length: the included part is done after a few evenings, and the Workshop rooms are built with varying care.
- “The puzzles are sufficiently hard without having that 'moon logic' feeling to them.”
- “A great puzzle game where you and your friends can work together, communicate clearly and solve clever escape rooms. Or spend 20 minutes arguing over who moved the key.”
- “It's short, I just blasted through the main episodes in 5 hours.”
Summarised by machine from 60 Steam reviews, not written by our editors. The quotes appear verbatim in those reviews.
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