What reviewers said
The publisher's launch round-up quotes Polygon calling it a near-perfect couch co-op addition, Techraptor at 9/10, The Gamer at 4/5 and GameSpew at 8/10; the 2022 original sits at a 79 aggregate for comparison.
Four outlets are quoted in the publisher's launch round-up, and each one is quoted exactly once. This page reproduces those quotes with attribution and date, adds the aggregate the publisher did not mention, and stays out of the way of the reviews themselves.
The quotes come from the "Review Round Up" section of the 6 November 2026 launch announcement on Steam. They are the publisher's selections, which matters: a publisher quotes the line it likes.
The quotes, verbatim
| Outlet | Score | Quote | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Polygon | No score given | "...a near-perfect new inclusion to couch co-op canon." | Launch week, November 2026 |
| Techraptor | 9/10 | "Escape Academy 2 lands the sequel spectacularly" | Launch week, November 2026 |
| The Gamer | 4/5 | "...Escape Academy 2 had me hooked the minute I got to see the full scope of its world." | Launch week, November 2026 |
| GameSpew | 8/10 | "a rich and exciting way to present an escape room game" | November 2026 |
Those are the complete quotes the announcement carries. They are short, they are all positive, and they are all about the same two things: the co-op experience and the scale of the campus. Read as a set, they agree with each other more than reviews usually do.
What the spread actually says
Nine out of ten and eight out of ten are close enough to be consensus, and the two unscored pieces are impressions rather than scored reviews. Nobody leads with the story, nobody cites a bug, and two of the four are about scope rather than puzzle design.
How to read a publisher's round-up
Four positive quotes and nothing below eight is what a round-up is, not dishonesty: a publisher quotes the line that matches the thing it wants you to notice. Read as a statement of where the game is strong, the selection says the co-op is the headline (Polygon's line is specifically about couch co-op), the world is second, and the puzzle design is third - only GameSpew's quote is about the format itself, and it is about presentation rather than cleverness.
| Question the quotes cannot answer | Why | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Is it buggy? | Reviews ran on pre-release builds | Known issues |
| Is it too easy? | Reviewers rarely play past the credits | Achievement ladder |
| Is the story good? | Dislike of story rarely reaches a pull-quote | The Steam forum, where players are blunt |
What a round-up cannot tell you
Three questions a quote cannot answer, and where to look instead:
| Question | Why quotes cannot answer it | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Is it buggy? | Reviews ran on pre-release builds | The known issues page |
| Is it too easy? | Reviewers rarely play past the credits | The achievement ladder and the brute-force thread |
| Is the story good? | Reviewers who dislike story rarely say so in a pull-quote | The forum, where players are blunt about it |
That table is the boundary of what quotes can establish. The selection is the publisher's, and the missing answers live behind those three links.
Steam reviews, and why there is no number here
The store API does not return a recommendations count for this appid at the time of checking, unlike the 2022 game's 1,155. What exists instead is more useful at this age: a clean achievement ladder from 98.3% to 1.0%, which means a lot of people started the game and very few finished - the normal shape for a story game in its first 72 hours.
The player-side signal that exists instead
Two days in, the more informative reception data is not the press. It is the achievement ladder, because it measures behaviour rather than opinion.
| Signal | Reading | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|
| 98.3% on the opening achievement | Almost everyone who launched the game got past the first beat | The opening is not a filter |
| 76.0% at ACH_THAT_RINGS_A_BELL | Three in four reach the second named room | The first hour retains |
| 24.4% at ACH_THE_GATE_OUTDOORS | A quarter have reached the point where the campus opens | The middle is where the drop-off starts |
| 3.3% at ACH_ESCAPE_THE_ACADEMY | Three in a hundred have finished the campaign | Expected at 48 hours, not a verdict |
The shape that matters: the fall from 76% to 24% is steeper than the fall from 98% to 76%, which is what you would expect from a game where the campus opens up and the route becomes the player's choice. Some of that drop is people who stopped; some is people who are still in the middle of an eight-to-fifteen-hour game on day two.
For a fair reading, revisit that table in a fortnight. A campaign completion rate near 3% at 48 hours and still 3% at two weeks would mean something different.
Where the reception actually points
Taken at face value the four quotes say this is a well-made co-op escape game with an unusually large world for the format, best played with a second person - which is exactly the store's own pitch. Taken with the missing data in mind, they say nothing yet about longevity, the DLC, or whether the puzzle design holds past the first two chapters. Those answers are a fortnight away, which is why the achievement ladder is the only longitudinal signal on this site so far.