There is a particular kind of invitation, rare in a genre that usually hands you a keypad and a clock that still ticks, in being asked to finish a professor’s last chapter and discovering that the entire product is an institute that used to be a home. The crow is still a crow. The valve is still a valve. The first poison that tries to teach you a lesson is not a metaphor. Mad Experiments 2: Escape Room, the first-person cooperative escape sequel from PlayTogether Studio, is built on that quiet, and the quiet is ruder, greener, and more useful than a thirteen-dollar lab has any right to be.
I played the PlayStation 5 version, the 11 April 2024 PlayStation launch at $12.99 that PlayTogether Studio and Nejcraft walked onto living-room hardware after a 13 October 2022 Steam life that already knew how to hide a valve. You wake as a patient. You explore four rooms. You solve Professor Cheshire’s last tests. You decide what the poison is for. Thirteen Steam achievements sit in the dust. The English Steam sample is Mixed, 67 percent of 66, with 81 voices across languages, which is the honest weather of a loud little sequel and not a dare. Great, not a career, and very much a night I would recommend you spend if you like a puzzle loop that knows it is a last chapter.
The Institute Does Not Care Why You Stayed
Most sequels begin with a bigger map and a smirk. Mad Experiments 2: Escape Room begins with an office. Official copy on Steam says you will explore the last chapters of the story of Professor Cheshire, then asks you, with the grammar of a person who has already lost the upright life, to live through the memories of one of his patients. He uses the Institute and his subjects to experiment on brains and minds, in order to find a cure for his sick daughter, Hildegarde. In that quest he loses his sanity and turns the place into a prison lab. That is not flavor text. It is the design refusing to pay for a new mansion when an institute will do.
You start looking because the alternative is becoming another subject in a place that keeps subjects in files. The first stretch is staged like a handshake that forgot to let go. You pick up experimental equipment. The office thinks about it. Something in the gas thinks about you. Nobody else will. That is the rest of the map.
I like a premise that prices curiosity as a hazard and then lets you walk toward it anyway. An office, a library, a Victorian greenhouse, and a last wagon sit on the night like questions with walls. Why are there poisons and no consent. What was that crow. The more you explore, the more the Institute answers with another object and another thing that would like a piece of your certainty. Story is environmental and stingy, which is the right instinct for a game that wants your hands more than your diary. You are not reading a novel. You are looting a lecture that is still happening.
The fantasy is not mastery of a lore bible. The fantasy is competence arriving about half an hour after you invent a reason to trust a valve. You will fail in ways that would be funny if the code drop were not so sincere. You leave a digit. You walk back. You become the kind of person who thinks a crow automaton is a personality.
Four Rooms, Then Invent a Poison
The loop is the old religion of look and PlayTogether Studio does not pretend otherwise. Interact. Examine. Rotate a bottle until it confesses. Write a number on a scrap of pride. None of that is a revolution. All of that is the sentence the rest of the toybox has to live in.
Official copy is blunt about the grocery list. Play alone or in a team of up to six. Challenge yourself with a sixty-minute limit, or take your time in Relax mode with unlimited time. Four unique rooms. Dozens of objects. A dark story that arrives in pieces. The rooms are not just lockboxes. They are how the game is built. The Prologue is The Office of Professor Cheshire, a desk and experimental toys that teach the grammar before the Institute gets rude. Chapter 1 is The Library, Hildegarde’s knowledge and an intriguing crow automaton that would like you to keep your voice down. Chapter 2 is The Greenhouse, Victorian glass, plant extracts, gas, and the poisons the Professor makes when he is still pretending this is medicine. Chapter 3 is The Train, the last wagon, a distillery, and a poison that could end Cheshire’s life and stop the experiments for good.
I have played a lot of games that treat the first lock as a tutorial and the hundredth as a spreadsheet. Mad Experiments 2: Escape Room is heavier than the first night and lighter than a career, on purpose. If you want a campaign that could unionize, you will feel underemployed. If you want a night that turns an office into a last wagon, you will feel hired. A keypad handles the general population of problems. A valve later will empty your patience if you treat the plants like scenery.
The sixty-minute clock is the temperature change. Early rooms establish that this is not a walking tour with nicer lighting. A dead end will chase your pride farther than a hint would recommend. Relax mode is the other half of the short description and the kinder half of a week. Official features ask you to take your time. That sentence is both a promise and a warning. If you want a speedrun receipt, the clock is already in the room. If you want a place that is already a place, you are the audience.
Crows, Valves, and a Friend Across the Table
Co-op is the closest this game comes to a power fantasy, and I like it more than a new cutscene. Mastery, here, is logistics wearing a voice. You gather, you stash a thought about a code, you talk like a person who has mail. The map does not get smaller because the developers deleted furniture. It gets smaller because you invented a sentence two people can share.
I will not invent a highlight reel with fake timestamps and tidy unlock counts. The nights that stay with you are the ones where you thought the keypad was finished, then a crow started talking in a rhythm that was not weather, and then you were on the wrong side of your own hint. Multiplayer can feel like two patients agreeing to take turns being disappointed. That clunk is real. It is also priced into a cooperative loop that would rather you look, retreat, and come back dressed. Distance helps. A friend who will read the other wall helps more.
An object in the hand is the other vehicle. Official features ask you to interact and examine with dozens of things to uncover the secrets of the rooms and understand why the Professor does all this. Physics has manners. Buttons push like buttons. A crow automaton will give you a look if you are willing to stand in the joke. A valve will ask you to match a plant to a shape and then ask you to do it again with gas in the air. A prop becomes punctuation, a tool for the thing you cannot reach or the code you need to steal before you commit.
Hints sit on the sheet if you would like the fantasy of progress without a lecture. I left them off for an evening and on for another. The rooms did not mind. Cheshire minded either way. Cross-platform multiplayer is on the store page, which is how a wider table gets in the door. I will not turn this into a matchmaking seminar.
Thirteen achievements sit behind the loop for people who like a receipt. Prologue: Escaped. Library: Silence. Greenhouse: Escaped. Train: Mastermind. None of them change the central truth. You are here to finish a test that has already decided Hildegarde is the reason and the poison is the sentence.
An Office, a Library, and a Greenhouse That Waits
Pressure is the variety. A door that opens is a better reward than a new silhouette if the silhouette is just another way to lose a number. Hunting clues is good practice and a grocery run. Offices, stacks, glass, the usual Cheshire hospitality. What the store page cannot tell you is how quickly you will start treating a successful examine as a mood stabilizer. You put the crow down and look at a distillery like a person who has decided civilization is a recipe.
The Prologue is the handshake. Warm wood. Experimental equipment. An office that still looks like it had a schedule and a reason to exist. You have been invited again. The invitation is a trap with better lighting. Getting a code with actual manners takes a while. Until then, a closer look is a strategy, not a cowardice.
The Library takes the air into stacks, a place Hildegarde used when she wanted more of the world than the Institute would sell. Official copy says she discovered unique secrets and met an intriguing crow automaton. The help is a pair of codes and a bird that does not explain itself. Silence is an achievement and a dare.
The Greenhouse is the one that stays in the lungs. Victorian glass. Plant extracts. Gas that the trailer is willing to admit is toxic. Official copy says you will manipulate gas, poisons, and plants to escape this dangerous place. Matching plants to shapes is the old religion. Doing it while the air is a critic is the sequel sentence.
The Train is the closer the first game could not afford. This is how everyone enters and leaves the Institute. In the last wagon there is a distillery that will let you make a poison that could end Cheshire’s life and stop the experiments for good. Wine bottles. Temperature. A recipe that wants four hands and will accept two.
Presentation is readable, which matters more than prestige. You can tell an office from a library from a greenhouse from a wagon at a glance. If you cannot read a biome, the hunt dies and the night becomes homework. These spaces are atmospheric enough to carry a scare and clear enough to carry a plan. You always know where you are. You do not always know why a number is already there.
English is the Steam language with full audio, and a pile of subtitle cousins later, which is how a wider audience gets in the door. I will not turn this into a localization seminar. Voice acting, music, and the small sounds of an institute that is still being used do the rest.
Pretty by Design, Obtuse by Habit
I should be clear about the friction, because it is a real thing and it is not a footnote you hide after the score. Mad Experiments 2: Escape Room looks like a game that was built by a small Quebec shop that wanted a last chapter more than a showcase, then discovered the last chapter was four rooms and a story about a girl. Landscapes can be handsome. Puzzles can be stubborn. A valve can arrive a half-hour late to its own logic. I will not invent a mud census. I will say the rooms sometimes forget to stock the clue you need and then shrug like weather.
The keypad is the old religion and the shop does not pretend otherwise. Too many doors still want a number you found on a scrap. That is the cost of blending a physical escape room’s appetite for locks with a video game’s appetite for looking. When it works, a familiar trope in a new drawer feels like the Institute breathing. When it fails, a familiar trope in a new drawer feels like a commute with better lighting. A globe will ask a person who is already lost in a library to also be a cartographer. A keypad on the train will, on a bad night, refuse to be a keypad. If you bounce before that commute, the game will look thinner than it is. If you stay, the last wagon fills the way the genre promised, and the promise is loud.
Co-op is a social instrument that the puzzles do not always play. You can share a view. You can split a search. You can still, on too many nights, solve the evening as one person with a better flashlight. The greenhouse is the room that most wants two hands at once, then, because solo is a first-class citizen, lets one player finish the sentence. I wanted more work that required two hands at once. The work I got was good enough that its scarcity became a complaint.
Technical manners on a living-room build can stutter when a late room decides to remember itself. Darkness can hide a clue that was already shy. Matchmaking can get philosophical in a doorway. A Silence achievement can refuse to hear the silence you already paid for. None of that is unique to this institute. All of that is the tax on a 2022 PC escape that arrived on PlayStation in 2024 and is still hiring in 2026.
Scope is the other tax. Four rooms is a contract, and a kinder contract than three, and still a contract. At $12.99 you are not buying a fifty-hour castle you can live in. You are buying a night you will finish, a table you will talk across, and a last wagon that will start to look familiar before it stops being handsome.
Better With a Table Than With a Checklist
I have a rule for mid-priced sequels. If a game is worse with a table than with a checklist, it is broken. If it is only good with a table, it is honest. Mad Experiments 2: Escape Room is honest, and that honesty should sit next to the price.
A checklist night is a competent weekend. You punch the office, you invent the code, you lose a digit, you walk back, you put a better look on the joke. A table night is the version the systems were quietly designed around. Someone reads the wall. Someone holds the crow. Someone learns, too late, that a professor does not respect architecture. The room becomes a shared instrument you play with friends instead of a commute.
The Steam sample around a game this small is always going to look like weather. Mixed is the official report, 67 percent of 66 English voices, and that split is fair. Players who wanted a deeper story, a prettier fight, or a valve that never argues with a plant bounce off. Players who wanted a lightweight last chapter with a crow and a bad idea about poison stay. I am in the second camp with caveats, which is the only honest place to stand.
Compared with the giants of the locked-room business, Mad Experiments 2: Escape Room is not trying to be a career you finish this week. It is trying to be a night you keep returning to with a different friend. The developer said the quiet part on the store page. Alone or with up to five players. Fun if you will meet the game where it lives. Some nights it is. Some nights the code is a myth and the doorway is a theology problem. Both nights are Mad Experiments 2: Escape Room.
Still Standing After the Train Leaves
Mad Experiments 2: Escape Room is a rare mid-priced sequel that understands its own joke and then has the nerve to make the joke a last wagon. PlayTogether Studio built an institute about a professor, a greenhouse about teamwork you do with a plant, and a toybox that looks a little homemade and plays a lot more sincerely than that sentence suggests. The loop is the hook. The objects are the spine. The walk from an office to a poison is the grin.
It is better with a table than with a checklist. The late rooms can clunk in the way a focused escape is clunky. Puzzles can sulk. The presentation has indie fingerprints, from the stubborn keypads to the story that would rather be a crow than a cutscene. All of that is true, and all of that is already priced in at $12.99 on PlayStation and $12.99 on Steam. You are not buying a decade. You are buying a night that can turn into several nights if you like being a coordinated disaster, or being the person who has to explain the disaster to a girl the first game already taught you to worry about.
I am scoring it 8.5, Great, because the identity is this clear and the limitations are the limitations of a focused four-room escape, not an empty one. I would recommend it to anyone who likes a drawer that has weight and a map that is allowed to be rude. Distinctive institute weather, a table that shrinks the horizon, a train that turns salvage into a last sentence, and a price that respects a long night are a lot of game for the ask. The systems repeat their manners. The manners are still useful.
The institute is still out there, still hiring a night shift, still asking what the mind was for. After a few doors, you will understand why the job is not finished, and why you keep boarding the train anyway.
We prepared this review with a digital copy of Mad Experiments 2: Escape Room for the PS5 version provided by Pressengine.
