REVIEW

The Academy: The First Riddle Review

by Rob Pritchard, July 10th, 2020

It is often said that one’s school days are the best times in a person’s life. While the validity of that statement is questionable, there are several video games which do a fairly good job at replicating the trials and tribulations of a school environment, such as Bully Scholarship Edition or the Persona series. The Academy: The First Riddle is the latest game to allow you to go back to the classroom. All that remains to be seen is whether it receives top marks, or if it deserves to be held in the video game equivalent of detention.

After a scene showing the apparent demise of an unnamed man, we are introduced to the protagonist Sam, who is beginning a four-year scholarship at The Academy, a prestigious school that defines itself as the pinnacle of education. Along with your new friends Dom and Maya, you spend the days of your new school life helping students in need, attending classes and investigating strange events that may be of supernatural or scientific origin.

Thematically, the game shares a lot with one of its key inspirations, the Harry Potter franchise. Sam, Dom and Maya could be described as a reskinned Harry, Ron and Hermione, with The Academy being a magicless version of Hogwarts. There are many other comparisons that can be made, but aside from these, The Academy does manage to separate itself from its inspirations and create a distinct environment by introducing completely original characters and motivations that haven’t been visited by the boy wizard and his friends.

The main gameplay of The First Riddle focuses on solving various Professor Layton-esque puzzles scattered throughout the game’s three chapters, alongside facing with a threat to The Academy’s existence that only Sam and his friends can solve. The puzzle difficulty ranges from being fiendishly easy to devilishly challenging, particularly if you decide to answer the bonus questions presented to you after every challenge. For the most part, the puzzles feel satisfying, especially if you solve them without using chocolate bars, which are somehow able to provide you with hints on how to proceed.

Outside of the puzzle solving, you can travel around The Academy from a third person perspective, similar to other graphic adventures such as Life is Strange and Telltale Games version of The Walking Dead. Alongside your academic pursuits, you can collect various hidden items and complete side quests assigned by teachers and classmates. Most of them are fetch quests, interspliced with the occasional secret puzzle, and obtaining an item to rescue a student from a locker-based predicament. The side quests will not win any awards for originality, but they are entertaining enough to distract you from the main narrative without feeling too much like a chore.

The Academy’s graphical style borrows from a realistic representation of the modern world, but it is rendered in a way in which it could resemble a painted drawing, similar to the effect used in Life is Strange. There are few instances of the frame rate dropping to a point where the game is unplayable, although you can sometimes notice some textures arriving after an area has appeared on screen. The soundtrack is a mixture of wistful orchestral themes, alongside some darker music when the action takes things up a notch. While it is slightly disappointing that The First Riddle does not include voice acting, it doesn’t detract from the overall presentation of the experience to a significant degree.

Overall, The Academy: The First Riddle is a moderately solid adventure game that offers an entertaining puzzle solving experience. If the developers can continue with or improve the experience in a future instalment of the series, it would be fair to say that The Academy could become one of the best adventures of its kind available via Steam.