Paris, Sep 2023
The premise of The Examination is unusual for Lock Academy – because this is your graduation exam. The test is overseen by an AI assistant, and assesses a variety of skills that have a suspicious degree of overlap with the skills needed to beat an escape room. Naturally, there may be more to the story than it first seems.
With many games at this company, the initial impression is good but the highlights come later. The Examination is definitely a game that builds up in excitement and spectacle as it goes on – although that said, I did enjoy the way the earlier sections presented well-defined self-contained challenges for us to tackle.
Partway through there’s a communication section where two of the group are separated from the rest. Opinions may vary, but my impression was that being left behind was a rather less good option, and those players got stuck with busywork tasks. More generally though, there’s a very nice transition in play style, from instruction-led tasks involving buttons and logic in the earlier sections to an increasingly physical, naturalistic and free-form style later on.
Lock Academy’s games are reliably great, and The Examination meets their usual high standards of design, drama and atmospherics. It’s polished and logical, well thought out and exciting; I find it hard to imagine anyone regretting playing this game. 
