9 Best Escape Room Video Games

Escape rooms, as a concept, have existed in one form or another for decades, though they really took off in the early 2010s as a fun way to pass the time with friends. I actually used to work down the street from one; the sign out front said, “great for parties, couples, and team-building.”

Naturally, as with anything that becomes popular, the concept has found its way into gaming as well. Puzzle games, involving a locked room or otherwise, have been a bedrock of the gaming industry for about as long as escape rooms have existed, though it’s mostly been in the last few years that straight-up “escape room games” have started coming into prominence.

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Much like their source of inspiration, these games place you and, perhaps, a friend in a confined space, requiring you to flex your powers of observation and deduction to solve puzzles and open the way out.

There are quite a few escape room games floating around various platforms, PC and mobile especially, but I’d say these are the most fun and intellectually stimulating.

9 Blue Prince

A Whole Escape House

Even the most elaborate escape rooms usually only have around three or four rooms, tops. Hey, you need real estate for this business, and there’s not always enough available.

Though, on the subject of real estate, there just so happens to be a lovely manor available for you to claim in Blue Prince. All you have to do is solve a gigantic, intricately-connected, randomized puzzle. Easy.

Blue Prince mixes escape room puzzles with roguelite progression, with each newly-opened door leading into a completely new room every single day. The majority of these rooms either contain a puzzle, or hide some manner of clue, either about the greater puzzle of the house itself or one of the specific puzzles in another room.

The game tells you in no uncertain terms that you need to be taking notes while you play, because there will be times when small details break things wide open.

Of course, the placement of the rooms is randomized with every subsequent day, so even if you have the right information, you might not have the right room. In addition to solving puzzles, you need to carefully place and manage your rooms so you don’t accidentally strand yourself.

8 Escape Simulator

An Escape Party From Home

As I mentioned, escape rooms are often advertised as being good for parties and get-togethers with friends. It’s fun to put your heads together and logic something out for its own sake, even if you’re not in imminent danger, Saw-style.

Of course, participating in an escape room requires you to go out and interact with people, and I’m not about that, so I choose to play Escape Simulator instead.

Escape Simulator is, well, exactly what it sounds like; a simulator for escape room games. Whether you’re by yourself or playing with friends, you can explore a multitude of escape room setups, hunting for clues, solving puzzles, finding collectibles, and all that other good stuff.

The game has a variety of room setups baked in, but it’s also got an extensive homebrew community, with hundreds of user-made escape maps freely available for you and your friends to take on.

What’s also neat about this game, compared to its contemporaries, is that it’s very low-limit. Anything that’s not nailed down, you can pick up, examine, and, if you’re so inclined, smash on the ground for laughs. Try to do that in a real escape room, and you’ll get a huge bill for it.

7 We Were Here Forever

Hope You’re Good At Giving Directions

If you’re in an escape room with your friends, you’re generally standing right next to each other while you solve puzzles. This makes it easier, because you’re seeing the same things, or you can just point to stuff if you can’t audibly describe it.

If you feel like challenging your teamwork skills, though, you take that benefit out of the equation by playing We Were Here Forever.

At numerous points throughout We Were Here Forever’s co-op campaign, you and your partner will be physically separated from one another, your only means of communication being a walkie-talkie.

This deliberately complicates things, as many of the game’s puzzles require information or context from a room that you can’t access, but your partner can, and vice versa.

The game also has a surprisingly extensive narrative focus, requiring both players to actively participate to see the story unfold. A lot of co-op games are just games for their own sake rather than telling a story, so it’s nice to see an experience really flex that potential.

6 Escape Academy

Beats Advanced Trigonometry

Any conceivable task in this life requires some degree of instruction to accomplish the first time, and better in subsequent times. Theoretically, this also includes escape rooms.

I don’t know that I’d ever want to attend a trade school specifically for escaping escape rooms, but I’m sure someone out there does, and that’s why Escape Academy exists.

This illustrious institution trains the next generation of escapists in all they need to know about solving puzzles, looking for clues, or thinking on their feet.

Whether by yourself or with a classmate, you can tackle the campus’ various escape challenges, as well as get specialized assignments from your teachers, like escaping a flooding room or defusing a live time bomb.

In addition to the base story mode, there are also competitive modes for multiple players. If you have an ongoing argument with a friend over who could escape a death trap first, settle it with a puzzle-solving escape room race or be the first to analyze a list of clues for a scavenger hunt.

5 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

“Seek A Way Out!”

If there are two things video game director and writer Kotaro Uchikoshi likes in his productions, it’s branching paths and escape rooms. I’d go as far as to call both concepts his collective bread and butter.

I say this because, while it’s not the first game he ever made, 999 is definitely his most well-known work, and the one that inspired most of his subsequent creations to a degree.

999 is a hybrid visual novel and puzzle escape room game. Our hero, hapless everyman Junpei, is trapped aboard a sinking ship with a group of weirdos, and the only way to not drown is to solve the ship’s many mysteries and work his way up to the top.

Most of the game’s branching paths happen during story segments, while the escape room bits are isolated to their own gameplay segments.

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During said escape rooms, you’ll need to thoroughly explore the various rooms you’re trapped in, uncover hints and prompts in incidentals and collectibles, and solve some mildly abstract puzzles.

Uchikoshi always likes to flex his knowledge of obscure trivia, so expect to be confronted with some pretty random science and trivia knowledge tests.

4 AI: The Somnium Files

You’ve Heard Of Mind Palaces, Try Mind Escape Rooms

While we’re on the subject of Uchikoshi, his other major game series, AI: The Somnium Files, cribs some basic gameplay concepts from 999 and its sequels, including the continued emphasis on branching stories and escape room gameplay.

The difference between the series is that, in AI, the branching paths have been integrated directly into the escape room segments.

In AI: The Somnium Files, special agent Kaname Date uses a proprietary technology to leap into the minds and dreams of witnesses and suspects of criminal cases, navigating their psyches to uncover clues. These “Somniums” are the game’s escape rooms, each one requiring you to think in abstract terms to navigate their surreal dreamscapes, and all with a hard time limit of just six minutes.

As I mentioned, the story’s path branches depending on how you tackle the Somniums. Nearly all of them have at least two solutions, and the information Date gains from pursuing a particular solution will change how his investigation unfolds.

As with Uchikoshi’s other works, you’ll need to backtrack through the flowchart and see every story branch to get the full picture.

3 The Room

Bite-Sized Escape Scenarios

Making a good escape room is difficult, at least I assume. It’s not just making one puzzle, it’s making a bunch of puzzles and interconnecting them with one another into an overarching mystery.

If you find something like that to be a little too intimidating, you might be better off with something a little more compartmentalized, but still representing the spirit of escape rooms, like The Room.

The Room is a series of bite-sized problem-solving scenarios, each one like a little escape room in itself. In addition to the usual spate of old-school problem-solving, these games also have a big emphasis on contraptions.

The very first game in the series has you trying to open up the world’s most elaborate safe, which has a multitude of different puzzle contraptions built into just about every square inch.

Subsequent games give you a little more to work with, branching out into several entire rooms with a handful of different contraptions to solve. The games still keep the focus tight, though, by opting for a standing point-and-click interface rather than letting you move freely.

2 Rusty Lake Hotel

You’re Not The One Who Needs To Escape

Before becoming fully-fledged video games, escape rooms were common fodder for point-and-click flash games, which you’d find on websites like Newgrounds.

One developer that has spent years dealing with both those and full, paid releases is Rusty Lake, which has made all kinds of spooky escape room scenarios since the mid-2010s. Pretty much any game it’s made is a good time, but my favorite is still its first premium release, Rusty Lake Hotel.

In this game, rather than trying to escape from locked rooms, you’re the one doing the locking. You and one of the hotel’s animal people guests are inside a hotel room, and by solving the room’s puzzles and mysteries, you’ll find an extremely elaborate and delightfully convoluted way to kill them dead. Afterward, you’ll serve their remains to the other guests as a fancy dinner. How cheery.

Interestingly, the game has a mildly abstract scoring system, but it has nothing to do with how fast you solve puzzles. Rather, the scores on your “dishes” are determined by how many optional ingredients you find.

These can be found both in and out of a guest’s room, encouraging you to be extra-thorough in your searching.

1 Is This Game Trying To Kill Me?

Yeah, Probably

A better writer than myself once said that a great formula for horror involves being trapped in a closed space with someone or something that hates you in a very visceral way.

You can find shades of this scenario in a variety of horror escape room games, but I think my favorite example is the one with the clearest title: Is This Game Trying to Kill Me?

In this game, you’re trapped in the usual spooky cabin by a gleefully murderous MC who wants you to play a little game for them. Specifically, an old puzzle game on a dilapidated computer in the middle of the room.

Seems straightforward at first, but as you play this game, it starts to have effects on the cabin you’re in. Bloodstained messages appear on the walls, new puzzles activate, and doors open up to hidden passageways.

This is also one of the few escape room games where you can actually die. Trying to brute force solutions or pulling random levers in the castle game will usually get you impaled by a gaggle of wall-mounted spears in the best-case scenario, so maybe don’t do that.

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