The game I played was Escape Simulator 2 (ES2), a video game developed by Pine Studio and released in 2025. The game is rated for everyone, but designed for the type of players who enjoy solving interconnected puzzles. It is playable as a single-player and multiplayer up to 8 players (but usually players will want to stick to under 4 so everyone has something to do). I played the game in a 2-player setting with Sabrina.
In ES2, the narrative is subservient to the gameplay mechanics. The main goal of the player is to solve the puzzles in the room — the setting and thematic pieces mainly exist to create a logical or sequential link from one puzzle to the next. However, that is not to say the game is without any narrative. ES2 uses techniques like embedded narrative through placement of puzzle pieces and decorations, and evocative narrative through the medieval and Dracula-based setting, to immerse the players in the setting. The enclosed architecture (by the nature of an escape room) also serves as hard boundaries to limit the player’s movement. The spatial layout packages all of the fragmented story pieces into one place for the player to find.
The biggest strength of ES2 is how it utilizes the architectural elements as key puzzle pieces in its gameplay. As opposed to physical escape rooms, the virtual platform of ES2 allows the game to portray magical effects that interface with the structures present in the space. One such example of this in the Courtyard level was the magical shrine puzzle, where I had to use a rudimentary English-Latin translation book to answer the questions from a wisp. The architecture subverts the player’s expectation — it’s a piece that wouldn’t be out of place in a courtyard, but it ended up serving a purpose for a puzzle. It’s this type of architectural design that delights players to discover more about the game. It encourages a gameplay dynamic of constantly treating every fixture as potentially useful, and highlights fun through discovery.
The mechanics-first approach of the game also doesn’t mean the game is barren of all narrative points. The affordances of the virtual platform also allows the game to put the user in supernatural predicaments. Particularly, in the Feast level, solving one of the puzzles turned my screen red and shrunk me down to fit on one of the dinner plates on the table. The sudden screen shake, change of color, and change of perspective surprised and scared me. In my opinion, this mechanic reinforces the narrative woven throughout the Dracula rooms because it’s a grandiose display of the powerful curses hidden inside the castle.
The main vehicle with which narrative is delivered is through embedded narrative. Pieces of the narrative are scattered through the rooms, both in clues and in red herring decorations. In those tidbits, the player can come to find out about the people who inhabited the space and why the room was left the way it was. Some may argue that the layout of the room is contrived and breaks immersion, but it makes sense when one considers that the primary motive of the game designer is to support the gameplay. In the words of Ernest Adams, “the primary reason for constructing most of the buildings in the world, is irrelevant”.
The Dracula rooms that we played also rely on evocative narrative — the level designer assumes that the reader is somewhat familiar with a medieval, Dracula-esque setting. By leveraging what the player already knows about Dracula and vampires, the game doesn’t waste any embedded narrative pieces on explaining how they are nocturnal, bloodsucking monsters. This allows the game designer to build a layer of narrative on top of the preexisting ones and create a more nuanced experience. One puzzle that explicitly showed this assumption is in Sweet Dreams, where players have to look into the mirror and see which portraits don’t appear with reflections. For players, it’s simultaneously interesting to ponder why there are portraits of humans and vampires alike in the bedroom (mixed bloodline?) and satisfying to find the clever use of preexisting knowledge to solve this puzzle.
The architecture and room design encourages a specific type of linear exploration that allows the narrative to be revealed slowly. In an escape room, the player must find a sequential set of clues and keys to escape. This lets game designer embed key pieces of narrative into key items that must be encountered from the player. This can be seen in the map puzzle of Sweet Dreams, where the player reads a travel log of a prospective traveler into Dracula’s castle. In reading that log, the player can make a connection about why they themselves are in the castle — perhaps they share the same motivations as the traveler, and are touring Dracula’s castle for fun.
With regards to accessibility, ES2 tries to address some common problems, but there are still a few accessibility issues. In the Sweet Dreams room, there was a period of flashing lights as the key was revealed in a case of lightning. However, the game doesn’t begin with a potential epilepsy warning, nor is there an option to turn off bright flashing lights in the settings (from what I found). One thing they do well is the control of motion sickness. I occasionally get nauseous playing first person games, but I found that with the option between changing my FOV, adding motion blur, and changing the lighting, I was able to make my experience enjoyable.
