What Escape Simulator 2 is
Escape Simulator 2 is a first-person escape room game where you walk around rooms, pick up and examine objects, wipe away dirt, drive vehicles, sit down wherever you like, and move anything that isn't bolted down. The goal in each room is to solve puzzles and find your way out. The rooms are built with escape room experts and community builders, and each room pack contains four rooms. Dracula's Castle sends you into a shadowy fortress to uncover its secrets and free the town from a dark curse. Starship EOS strands an exploration vessel after a collision, and you need to retrieve an energy source from a mysterious dark sphere. The Cursed Treasure has you following a cryptic map to a pirate island, getting past treacherous trials, and claiming the ancient treasure. More content is planned after release.
Playing it with your group
You can play solo or join friends online, with up to 8 players in a session. Built-in voice and text chat is there for talking through puzzles, which matters when one of you spots a clue the others walked past. Since everything in the room is interactive, splitting up works well: people fan out, grab objects, and bring findings back to the group. The co-op campaign runs through the same rooms, so everyone is working on the same puzzles together rather than in separate instances.
Building your own rooms
Room Editor 2.0 lets you craft your own escape rooms, with tools made more powerful and intuitive after the first game saw over 4,000 community rooms. A new lighting engine helps your rooms look closer to the official ones, the Building Editor lets you design rooms including working stairs, and Sequence animations bring things to life. If your group likes solving more than playing, this is where you can hand each other custom rooms to crack.
Before you start
The tone is darker and more mysterious than the original, but it is not a horror game: there are no jump scares and no gore. The developers rebuilt rendering, networking, physics, and animations for the sequel, so expect a different feel from the first game rather than a simple expansion. The original Escape Simulator keeps getting updates, including the Mayan DLC, so both games remain playable if your group already has time invested there.