Base price: $18.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 1 – 2 hours.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 1
Full disclosure: A review copy of EXIT: The Magical Academy was provided by KOSMOS.
Seems like a good week to highlight some old stalwarts. Two of my favorite publishers, this week, with two new entries in two series I genuinely enjoy. For one, we’ve got a new EXIT game. Always exciting; lots to do there. The other will be Kimono Memories, new from EmperorS4 Games and another entry in the well-respected Hanamikoji series. It’s exciting, though you may have to wait a bit longer for that one, since it’s an Essen release. There’s honestly a ton of cool games coming down the pipeline; so many that I need to remember to bring a few with me to PAX West this weekend so that I can play them there and write about them later. We’re ongoing. But I’ve already played EXIT: The Magical Academy, so let’s talk about it!
In EXIT: The Magical Academy, players take on the role of students and upcoming … mages? I haven’t thought enough about the gender-neutral term. Let’s go mages. Unfortunately, there’s been a bit of a fiasco, and little critters have emerged to cause chaos and wreak havoc. Luckily, you know exactly which spell you’ll need to get rid of them! Unluckily, you do not have any of the ingredients you need. So you’ll have to explore the school and potentially uncover even deeper mysteries if you want to figure out what’s really going on. Will you be able to save the day?
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Oh, this was a good one! EXIT: The Magical Academy plays well in the well-treaded theme of magical schools, but focuses more on the puzzles and mysteries inherent to one than some other examples I’ve seen in the past. This should not be surprising; it’s an escape room game. One thing does jump out more than other EXITs I’ve played in the past, as well, and that’s the art. The game looks good, and there’s good color work and creature design such that it keeps the fun and classic spirit of the EXIT games while still being dynamic and interesting for players. I think these two things combine to really bump The Magical Academy up my list, perhaps even setting it at the top for new players. It’s a solid entry, on that front. The puzzle design is great (unsurprising for the Brands), and I didn’t see any place where outside knowledge or familiarity with the series would help. Plus, the game continues my personal favorite trend of rewarding players with a tiny tchotchke of some kind once they complete the game.
This was, interestingly, my first time playing remotely with more than one copy of the game (my standard EXIT partner and I each had a copy of the game and played online), and I gotta say: I was very pleased with how well that worked. In the past, we had played a few with the help of an overhead camera, but we all found that it was a bit of a subpar experience (the games were still great; the remote experience was mediocre) because of visual issues and, frankly, the desire to touch everything. Here, since the puzzles were fairly linear anyways, you could collaborate on a solution and then occasionally skip things like turning the dial because the other player already had it covered. I’m fairly positive the EXITs weren’t designed for remote play, but I’m very pleased to note that playing with multiple copies of the game works quite well for the distributed puzzle solvers among y’all.
There was pretty good novelty in the puzzles across the board, as well. I muse occasionally on how long-running of a series the EXIT games have been, but they show no sign of losing steam or slowing down in any capacity; I’ve already got three more to check out and I can see there’s at least one more jigsaw puzzle and another advent calendar coming sometime. The Brands keep busy. But there’s comfort in that reliability, especially when you get solid titles like The Magical Academy. It’s a nice and approachable starting point as the EXIT series continues to expand, and having more gateways into a series or even a genre is never a bad thing. If you’re a fan of the escape room games genre (or even if you’re new to it!) or you just want to explore a magic school without having to think about some lady’s deeply incorrect takes on the Olympics, I’d recommend EXIT: The Magical Academy! It was a delight to play.
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