Capturing the appeal of real-life escape rooms in a game is a rather tall order. So much of the appeal is that you’re physically present in the space rather than staring at it through a screen. But Escape Academy comes as close as it’s possible to get without going outside, and it starts out by making its clever tutorial an intentionally crummy approximation of the real thing.

That first room is supposed to be a dungeon of some sort, complete with a poorly constructed dummy hanging from the wall. But it’s all fallen into disuse, certainly not livened up by the inattentive clerk waiting outside. And even if the place was still in good shape, what sort of dungeon has fluorescent lights and a wall clock?

But humor aside, the “dungeon” is a particularly sly bit of game design, enabling the game to start players out with easy puzzles that subtly teach you the mechanics while fitting right into the ramshackle atmosphere. You’re holding things in your inventory, and you’re paying attention to semi-cryptic codes on leaflets that tell you to look at certain colors and letters. There’s even a sticky note on the clock telling you what time it’s supposed to say, signaling that sometimes these background details are important.

Soon enough, as you continue solving puzzles in the shop’s waiting area, you learn the truth: The whole thing is a front, a proving ground to find candidates for an elite school for Escape Room Masters: the Escape Academy (the headmaster herself turns out to be the clerk in disguise). You, naturally, become its newest student. From there, the training wheels are off; as conceived by the academy’s quirky staff, the escape rooms become much longer and more difficult, without any helpful sticky notes or blinking UI indicators to guide you along. They’re also timed just like the real thing, adding an element of pressure. The immediate next challenge, for example, finds you scrambling to put together the clues that will tell you the headmaster’s name, which serves as the password to shut off the device piping memory-erasing gas into her office as a preliminary test.

The atmosphere, with its exaggerated cartoon character designs and badges to mark progress, is a bit reminiscent of Psychonauts, with a badge-collecting rival character adding a dash of Pokémon. And while a video game can’t capture the tactile feeling of interacting with a real-life escape room, the virtual format does allow for much stranger, more ostentatious puzzles and situations. Sometimes you’re opening new areas with simple keys, but sometimes you’re using a chainsaw to slice through the vines blocking part of a lavish greenhouse (and then puzzling out where to get additional fuel to slice through the vines on the other end). One has you frantically searching for the antidote for a poisoned milkshake, and another tasks you with ascending ladders to escape flooding water, among other potentially dangerous tasks—one newspaper clipping proudly notes that the academy’s injuries are down 30% for the year.

The real strength of Escape Academy, beyond just the variety of its puzzles, is the imaginative context for them, with codes and riddles and clues nestled within things like optical illusions, vending machines, butterflies, and toast. They’re all built around distinct themes, too, so each puzzle comes with bespoke art, animation, and sometimes new mechanics—one has you moving a computer screen avatar by walking around a dance floor, while another requires you to flip through manuals to enter radio codes. (You will, however, become very accustomed to the little jingle for solving a puzzle.)

Crucial to capturing the appeal of an escape room is that you’re moving through an open space, tackling puzzles in any order rather than following an obvious path. Each room is just large enough to run around when you’re stuck, eyes peeled for some detail you missed. Panic mounts as you find only the groan-inducing puns that pop up whenever you examine an object you can’t otherwise use. There is a hint system, but using it knocks points off your final score.

Playing solo, it pays to keep a notebook handy to jot down information against the ticking clock when a puzzle calls for you to remember certain instructions. But where Escape Academy truly shines is in its multiplayer mode, ably simulating the thrill of bouncing ideas off a friend and/or shouting at them because they’re doing it wrong. You’re able to rely on communication rather than a notebook or memorization, like having one person rearrange statues while the other scrutinizes the paintings that hint at the correct order. Then, of course, you can bask in the successful teamwork while each level’s results screen shows all the different puzzles you solved in the process of reaching the end.

The idea of a digital escape room might seem redundant at first since escape rooms are essentially video game puzzles brought to life, but Escape Academy captures the frenzied physicality and unique puzzles that set in-person rooms apart. A more conventional, quote-unquote “intuitive” game might have made some hints and instructions easier to reference, but the need to memorize, write down, or shout at another player grounds you in the space, making it seem tangible rather than weightlessly virtual. Likewise, a more traditional, iterative sense of game design would repeat certain mechanics over and over, but Escape Academy insists on something totally fresh. All told, it captures the elusive rush of novelty and unpredictability inherent to the real thing, as well as the sense of triumph after seeing one through to the end.