Review: Escape Goat 2

Posted by Curtis H on November 7th, 2014 | 2 Comments | Tags: Escape Goat 2

I had zero expectations for Escape Goat 2 when I first booted it up during our Extra Life stream a couple weeks ago. It was actually one of few games released these days that I didn’t really know much about. It didn’t take long for Escape Goat 2 to surprise me. The time flew by and I found myself deeply enjoying each new puzzle that the game threw my way.

In Escape Goat 2 you control a Goat with a magical mouse partner as you’re tasked with finding hidden sheep souls and escaping from a tower. At the start you’ll be able to double jump, headbutt movable blocks, and activate switches as you collect keys to open doors. Before long however you’ll have a mouse friend that can crawl through tight spaces and hit switches that would otherwise be out of reach. With even more progression you’ll find special costumes for that mouse that grant it special powers. The game uses all of these abilities in some really cool and unique ways as you’ll come up against more and more challenging puzzles. Not only that, but Escape Goat 2’s gameplay is really good at creating this sense of teamwork between what is otherwise a really unlikely duo.

Escape Goat 2 is a game that you could potentially finish having only seen 50% of the content. (There’s even a trophy that requires you to finish the game in under thirty minutes.) However as you progress you’ll unlock all new and even more challenging puzzles. To finish every stage in the game it took me around five hours, but from there you’ll have mutators unlocked that change a number of different things about the game. For one you’ll now be able to display a speed run specific timer on screen, you can turn enemies invisible, give the goat infinite jumps, and even activate a pretty cool reference to Super Meat Boy. There’s certainly replay value in speedrunning the game, but I imagine playing around with many of the other mutators will be fun as well.

The puzzles in Escape Goat 2 are smart, they’re rewarding to solve, and they get a lot of mileage out of simple mechanics. Some puzzles do rely on timing which some may not like, but I never found them to be too frustrating. Besides if you screw up you’re just a quick tap of the touchpad away from resetting the level. Considering that every level can be finished within a minute I never found it frustrating when I messed up. That said I do wish the controls of the goat were a little bit tighter. There were a few times where I screwed up on stages that required some quick reflexes because of some loose controls, but ultimately that’s a pretty minor complaint. (More specifically the goat’s jump has a bit of an arc to it that sometimes betrayed me when I was trying to be quick.) All of this and I haven’t even mentioned how great the soundtrack is. This song in particular I found to be one of my favorites.

Escape Goat 2 proved to be so much more than I ever thought it would be. It’s the kind of puzzle game that takes simple mechanics, challenges you, and makes you feel like a genius. The great soundtrack and mutators just serve to be the cherry on top.

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here.