izigame.me

As a long-time connoisseur of escape games dating back to the earliest Flash games of the genre, I can say with confidence that this is the one. Escape Simulator has crafted an excellent system to convey many of the same puzzle types I've found at in-person escape rooms, and several puzzle types that are only possible through the wonders of video games. While lacking hyper-realistic graphics, the art style is still clear and pleasant and the game runs well. The base game and DLCs, both free and paid, provide a nice variety of room styles and puzzle types. While I personally don't typically find any room particularly challenging, it was a common experience for me to have a puzzle or two per room that did stump me for a few minutes, and was rare for a room to be so easy that it was rushed through in a few minutes.

Where Escape Simulator really shines is in its community rooms. The devs have put a ton of time and effort into making an escape room-building tool that is overall quite accessible to beginners and leaves a lot of room for creativity with more advanced and technical designers. They've also done a lot of work to foster the creation of community rooms, with regular room creation challenges and regularly updated lists of featured rooms. These community rooms take the game's replayability and extends it practically to infinity. Not every single room is a winner, but a lot of them are and feature novel and interesting takes on the escape rooms. This was the single smartest move for this game, and it feels like everyone wins for it. The devs get more longevity and popularity to their game, community room designers get a platform for recognition and a place to implement their ideas without making a brand new oneshot game, and people like me get a more or less unlimited stream of rooms to play and enjoy.

I love escape rooms, and for anyone else that also feels that way, this is the game to get.