Paradox Project: The Music Academy

Few companies have such a reputation as Paradox Project; and for me personally, their game The Bookstore is my all time favourite escape room. So The Music Academy had quite a lot to live up to. And while it hasn’t displaced its predecessor from my top spot, it certainly doesn’t damage the company’s reputation.

The first two PP games form a connected narrative, and you’re strongly advised to play the first before the second. The Music Academy stands alone, at least for now; when the company’s fourth game opens I believe it will be a sequel to it.

All the Paradox Project games are 3+ hours long, and playing The Music Academy will take up an entire afternoon or evening. We again played as a two, below the official minimum team size, and for much of the game I expected we’d go way over time – it felt like we were playing at too slow a pace. In fact we finished before the deadline, and would have been fairly comfortably before it if we’re hadn’t gotten stuck on a final puzzle. For that reason I’d say that The Music Academy is less frantic than the previous games; it allows you to spend time wrestling with its puzzles before (hopefully) solving them.

Athens has some remarkably sophisticated use of technology in some of its top escape rooms. By those standards, The Music Academy is back to basics, in that it prefers physical hand-made mechanisms. That is in no way a criticism. One of several moments I’ll cherish from this game was a puzzle where I was expecting something to trigger electronically when we had everything in the right place, only to find that it provided us with a far more satisfying way forward.

Thinking outside the box is the venue’s slogan, and as with previous games, great use is made of lateral thinking and illusions, in the widest sense. After hundreds of escape rooms it’s rare to see puzzle ideas that are fresh and original; The Music Academy is full of them, and the few places where technology is used, it tends to be for entirely novel mechanisms I haven’t seen anywhere else.

And of course the story is absolutely central. Periodically the gameplay pauses to advance the narrative via a diary-style video, gradually building up the history of your surroundings. Forty minutes in I thought I knew where the plot was going; I was wrong. It gradually builds up a history of your surroundings and reveals greater significance to your actions.

I found Paradox Project’s previous game The Bookstore transcendental. The Music Academy didn’t reach quite the same heights, but held against any less exalted bar it’s superb: a procession of scenes that gradually walk you deeper into a mystery by way of puzzles that are surprising, cerebral, and clever. Like the first two games, this should be on your must-play list for an Athens trip.