At the Summer Game Fest: Play Days, we had the chance to try out Coin Crew Game’s upcoming title Escape Academy. The premise is an intriguing one, you’re a student at an academy that specializes in escaping from rooms that are essentially death traps. We learned this first hand when we were unable to figure out the room and ended up drowning as a result. After our session, we sat down with Coin Crew Game’s Co-Founders Mike Salyh and Wyatt Bushnell, who went gave us a inside perspective on the creation of Escape Academy, and were more than happy to see us writhe in despair after failing to get out of their escape rooms.
mxdwn: Can you please explain how you came up with the academia aspects and how that coincides with the escape room aspects?
Mike: So when we started making this game and when we knew we wanted to make an escape room adventure, one of the most important things was we wanted to feature a big variety of different environments. The more environments you can visit the more different puzzles we can design. We started thinking ‘what is a setting were we can put the player through different courses and different challenges?’ So we came up with this school setting because it also helps explain why are you solving puzzles in the first place, somebody has to be designing the puzzles and that is why we came up with this whacky cast of professors and other students who are in the lore and who are the ones designing these puzzles.
mxdwn: It’s an amazing concept. When we were playing it, we had some flashbacks to older titles that also used the point and click style with a narration/text based adventure format. Did any of those have any sort of influence during the development process?
Wyatt: I think Escape Academy at its core is a very dressed up point and click adventure game. We’re influenced by Myst and all those point and click adventure games, but also typical puzzle titles that really scratched that creative itch for us. So we tried to pull from a lot of different places.
Mike: On the escape room side of that I think one of our really big inspirations was 999 (Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors). That game was my personal introduction to escape rooms and I’m such a fan of it. The Room on mobile and Phoenix Wright in a way cause it incorporates humor into these otherwise what could be serious situations. So I think we pulled a lot of different influences together but it’s definitely a lot there to build on.
Wyatt: Yeah it’s life threatening, but we tried to keep the humor kind of present throughout the game. Escape Academy is about fun.
Mike: It’s stressful fun!
mxdwn: The fun is definitely there, but there’s also a major challenge aspect. What was weighing more when developing this, the fun or the challenge? Or was it trying to be about even?
Mike: I think it’s trying to find the right balance of difficulty, because we want puzzles that make people feel like ‘when you solve it you get that moment like I’m a genius.’ But you also got to get the despair of ‘ oh no how will I ever solve this?’ When you can connect the two you get this real big adrenaline rush. We want people to lose sometimes and win eventually.
Wyatt: Making sure that every puzzle is well clued so that every player has everything in front of them so that they can solve the puzzle. Making sure that everything is fair was a big thing. You don’t have to lose your mind to solve a puzzle.
Mike: You don’t have to know, say the rules of chess, or know something from outside the game like a trivia fact ever to beat the puzzle. We try to make sure all the rooms are self contained.
mxdwn: The teachers and other faculty members in the game are very vibrant and colorful. You talked about it a bit earlier but could you elaborate a bit more into making those characters?
Wyatt: I always hate games that are like ‘why am I here, what’s the actual reasoning behind me being here?’ So we wanted to make sure that we weren’t solving puzzles for puzzles sake, you were solving puzzles so that you could be come an escapist. Pulling teachers in there who all have these distinct personalities and who have their own teaching syllabus and that sort of thing was something that we wanted to make sure came through. Creating that narrative we felt gave the players the reason to keep playing rather than having a disconnected series of rooms and have a consistent thread of learning how to become an escapist.
mxdwn: It’s an impressive thing to be sure, especially how it all connects in the game. Could you please tell us when the game launches and for what platforms?
Mike: Escape Academy is coming out on July 14. It’s going to be available day one on the Xbox Game Pass. Coming to Xbox (Xbox One and Xbox Series X/Series S), PlayStation (PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5), and PC (Steam).