Escape Simulator is a set of digital escape rooms. If you haven’t heard of escape rooms: 1. Welcome, I’m not sure how you ended up on this blog of all places, and 2. in real life, escape rooms are sets of chained puzzles and challenges, usually with the end goal being to “escape” the room you started in.
Escape Simulator is a digital version of that experience, complete with full multiplayer for all official content. You and (possibly) your friends are all stuck in some sort of area, and need to solve various puzzles to get out.
The game has about 10 hours of content of official content. There are four 5-part challenge rooms, each about 10 minutes per part, and 6 more official larger rooms, each about 30-60 minutes each. (Yes, some of them have 45 minute completion times. No I’ve never finished a single one of them that quickly.)
Puzzles in Escape Simulator generally follow either a multi-chain or parallel puzzle structure. While there is a blueprint for how puzzles stack together in the structure of a room, the individual gameplay of a puzzle can vary a fair amount. Some arebased on decoding. Others are based on looking for hints in the environment.
Is it worth it?
Usually during a writeup, this is the part where I would explain game mechanics, and talk about their interactions. But since escape rooms consist of solving mysteries and puzzles, I’m not sure that does much here. Instead, let’s talk about something related for a moment.
Many video gamers video gamers do a certain kind of math before recommending a game (and I count myself as guilty of this as well). If the ratio of time to dollars is under 1 hour/$1, that’s no bueno. A game can be a brilliant, innovative and cleverly constructed experience, but if it clocks in at only 3 hours for $20, that’s already a hard sell.
It’s a bit weird, because I can’t think of another hobby group that actively does this, to this extent. Sure, the folks of Board Game Geek and the Board Gaming subreddits like to write about how much they care about replayability, while sitting on a throne of plastic wrapped purchases that they haven’t opened in the last four years, next to the other games they opened and never played more than once. But I don’t see movie buffs whining about the fact that Oppenheimer is $23 for only 180 minutes of film. Ski tickets can be $100 for just eight hours, and that’s not counting how much it costs to buy gear, get out the mountain, and the hospital bills after you fall off the chairlift.
Escape rooms, for example, are not cheap. I looked up prices for the ones around me, and one charges $38 per person for a one hour experience. Another was $100 for 4 people, and 45 minutes.
So, going back to Escape Simulator. It’s not really a “huge” amount of game. It’s also all puzzles, so it’s not really repayable. On the other hand, it works out to about $1.50 per hour, per person. Real escape rooms are about 20 times that.
Mods
Now, the other thing that Escape Simulator has on offer is fairly extensive set of mods. As good as the community content is, I have to view them as more of an addition than a reason to straight up recommend the game. The reason for this is that the quality and type of experience available in each one varies.
One mod I played was pretty much a straight up horror game. While generally very well put together, it did have a puzzle made vastly harder by the fact that the designer had chosen to add a spooky effect that made it hard to even see the puzzle.
Another mod had a particular brand of moon-logic in its answers. One room had a challenge that simply lacked mechanical feedback, rendering it incredibly confusing. And another was just a good solid puzzle experience.

The mods are amateur, in the literal dictionary definition. They are made by non-professionals for personal enjoyment. While the resulting experiences are interesting and fun, they often lack polish, or feel like they could have been playtested/tweaked to make a bit more sense.
In no particular order, here are a few mods I liked.
Karakuri Castle by namo_krub
Laundry Day by namo_krub
Little Emily by cico
Overall
I enjoyed Escape Simulator, but I’d mostly recommend it as a multiplayer experience. There isn’t any overall story or narrative to give meaning to the rooms. It’s just a set of fairly well designed puzzles with a surprising amount of high quality community content.
Escape Simulator is $15 on Steam.