Is it worth $16.99?
At $16.99 it is a fair price for an eight-to-fifteen-hour campaign that plays best with a second person; buy it for couch co-op or for a puzzle night, and skip it if you want a long solo campaign or need PlayStation cross-play.
$16.99 buys eight to fifteen hours of escape rooms inside a campus you can walk, playable alone or with one other person, with no microtransactions and no season pass gate on the campaign. That is a fair trade. Whether it is your fair trade depends on three things, and two of them are about the people you play with.
The price is the launch discount on a $19.99 list; the length is the developer's own figure given on the Steam forum on 6 November 2026; the content is what the store and the four announcements describe.
What you get, priced against alternatives
| What you are buying | Detail | Comparable spend |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign | 8-15 hours, handcrafted rooms | Two cinema tickets for two people |
| Co-op | Two players, online or split screen | A board game night, permanently |
| Replay value | Replays exist, ranked, described as rough | Second playthrough for A+ ranks |
| Post-launch content | Two expansions covered by a $14.99 pass | Roughly one expansion's worth |
The cleanest comparison is not another video game, it is the thing this game is imitating. A real escape room costs $30-40 per person for one hour. This is a one-off $16.99 for a household, and the rooms are designed by people who do this professionally. If you have ever paid for a physical escape room and enjoyed it, the price argument is over before it starts.
Who should buy it now
You play with a partner or a friend in the same room. This is the case the game is built for. Split screen, two players, no friend pass needed because you are on one machine. The publisher's review round-up leads with Polygon's line about it being a near-perfect addition to the couch co-op canon, and that is the correct framing.
You liked the 2022 game and want more rooms. The sequel is the same room design philosophy with a campus around it. If the first game's four to five hours felt short, this is three times the content at the same price.
You want a puzzle game you can play at your own pace. No-Timer Mode is a first-class option in the menu, not an unlock, and it changes the genre from a stress test to a Sunday afternoon.
You have a second person who is not a puzzle gamer. This is the underrated case. Co-op with a mismatched pair is exactly what No-Timer Mode and adjustable difficulty exist for, and the game is designed so neither player needs to be the expert.
Who should wait
You need PlayStation cross-play. It does not exist. PC and Xbox play together; PlayStation does not join them. If your group spans platforms, this is a hard stop rather than an inconvenience.
You want a long solo campaign. Eight to fifteen hours solo is real, but it is a solo run through content designed for two perspectives, and the campus travel is a bigger share of the time when nobody is talking. If you bounced off the first game's pacing, the campus will feel like padding rather than freedom.
You want the DLC content now. The Season Pass sells two expansions with no dates. Buying it today is pre-paying for something the studio has described only in shape - new narrative, new rooms, extra credit quests. That is a bet, not a purchase.
You are on 8 GB of RAM. The minimum is 16 GB and it is the spec that quietly fails. The demo answers whether your machine copes; the specs say it does not.
The criticisms worth taking seriously
Three, all from players rather than reviewers, and all of them fair:
Too many puzzles can be brute-forced. A player made this case at length, and the reply defending the design is also fair: with four keys and four locks, once you know two placements the last two are a coin flip, and no design removes that. If the pleasure of a puzzle game is in the certainty of the deduction, this one will occasionally let you stumble through.
The replays are rough. Replaying a room to chase an A+ rank shuttles you into the next stage rather than back to the dorm. The developer has acknowledged it publicly as something added late and slated for a quality-of-life patch. If you are a completionist, this is the current state.
The campus can feel like walking. This is the structural bet of the game. Sometimes the answer to "where is the next room" is "across the grounds and up a hill", and for some players that is atmosphere while for others it is a walk.
The criticisms not worth taking seriously
"It is a Walmart-brand Escape Simulator." A thread title, not an argument. The two games do different things, and they are sold bundled together precisely because the publisher does not see them as substitutes. The comparison page has the detail.
"The first game had unfixed co-op bugs, so this one will too." A fair thing to be wary of, and the launch-week evidence cuts the other way: the studio shipped a hotfix within 24 hours, replied to individual bug threads including offering to hand-edit save files, and has a tracked list for rendering fixes. That is not proof the game is bug-free, and it is direct evidence against "drop a hot mess and ghost".
"It is too short." Eight to fifteen hours at $16.99 is $1.13-2.12 an hour. The complaint usually means "I wanted more", which is a different sentence.
The verdict in one paragraph
Buy it at $16.99 if you have someone to play it with and you like the idea of a campus between the rooms. Buy it if you liked the first game. Wait if you need PlayStation cross-play, if you want the expansions on a schedule, or if walking to puzzles sounds like a chore rather than a holiday. Do not buy the Season Pass yet unless you are comfortable pre-paying for undated content - the base game is complete and self-contained, and the pass can be added later.
Next: which edition to buy, or the reviews page if you want the quotes in full before deciding.