PSBlog Feed: Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School comes to PS5 on November 5

[Commander Fury]

Hello Puzzlers and PlayStation fans! The team at Coin Crew Games is excited to share that Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School will be coming to PS5 on November 5. To celebrate, we are sharing some deep-dive information about what players can expect in this sequel that expands the first game from a more linear narrative to a whole new open-world campus. Of course, you can also expect couch or online co-op play available from the get go between the full campus, story and all of its puzzles.

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Whether you played the first game or not, Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School is open to everyone and represents a more fully-realized campus experience. We want the Academy to feel like a place players can get lost in, filled with characters, quests, secrets, and plenty of reasons to explore between escapes.

Welcome (back) to campus

Our campus is broken up into several distinct sections, each filled to the brim with quests and puzzles for you to encounter throughout the journey. For this lesson, we’re sharing new details on the Headmaster’s Tower and Humanities Campus, which makes a more expanded return from the first game after [spoiler!] Quanty burned down the library in the first game.

The Headmaster’s Tower was one of the first spaces we worked on when designing the updated visuals in Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School and it inspired the most discussion about how to make a space feel truly “Academic” and further push the worldbuilding before expanding on each location’s unique identities. Players will get a sense of the Academy’s history more than ever with this area while still discovering plenty of playful and strange puzzles.

This also led us back to the Headmaster’s Office, which was the setting of our very first escape in the original Escape Academy. The location became our visual target as we began leveling up the art style for Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School. We hope players will see how we pushed the visual identity of the Academy further while still making it recognizable to returning players.

From concepts to being fully realized, the Humanities Campus has seen the most deviation from the first entry’s 2D map layout. It was a fun challenge designing this game to be more open world as we went through a lot of iteration with this area. At first, things felt too open, and we eventually found lots of new ways for players to engage with the area like interactable landmarks, side quests and escapes.

As the art director, one of my favorite parts of building the game has been making the world itself part of the experience. Puzzles aren’t strictly limited to rooms anymore. This campus itself will reward you for staying curious.

Because part of the Humanities Campus had to be rebuilt after the first game’s story, I expanded on the classical architecture inspiration from the original game’s library design. Compared to the rough and gritty industrial vibes of the Science Campus, or the colorful Arts Campus, I wanted to give this area a cozier feel, that might encourage a quiet coffee break or a philosophical puzzle discussion amongst students, while still inspiring some sense of mystery and discovery between its faculty offices, classrooms and library. 

You won’t have access to the Humanities Campus right away, but you’ll catch glimpses of it often with a striking keyhole-shaped fountain that can be seen across some of the best sightseeing spots on campus for you and the other students. This is intentional as we designed the campus itself to be its own living, breathing puzzle for you to unravel; we want exploration to feel as rewarding as puzzle-solving. Our hope is to create moments where players see something interesting before they understand how to reach it.

We also hid a lot of keyhole embellishments all around the Academy, see if you can find them all.

That’s all for today’s lesson. The team and I are thrilled to be bringing Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School back to PlayStation fans around the world when the game launches for PlayStation 5 on November 5. We can’t wait for players to explore the Academy, uncover its secrets, meet new and returning faces, and discover that there’s much more to this school than meets the eye.

Stay tuned for more updates about the game.

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