Escapestudios Reviews 2

I'm writing this because I honestly wish someone had warned me before I signed up. Please don't make the same mistake I did. The amount of money they charge for what you actually get is daylight robbery.

First off, the teaching is a joke. The modules they advertise aren't quite what you get in reality. While the main topics are covered, they don't deliver on everything they promise. Some of the specific techniques and even entire software programs they advertise are never actually taught or used, and the official lesson plans aren't followed properly. You're only in class for 9 hours a week, and this leaves the modules feeling incomplete. The course is structured so you have 21 weeks of this, and the other 26 weeks are for "personal projects." That’s more than half the year where you're basically on your own. You get a tiny bit of guidance, but you're left to figure everything out and teach yourself. This isn't a taught course; it’s a self-taught one that you pay a fortune for.

The way this place is run is just baffling. Our main tutor left halfway through the course, and nobody even bothered to tell us. They just vanished. We didn't get a single email or announcement, nothing. We were just left completely in the dark. On top of that, their website was broken for the first half of the year, which is just basic stuff they couldn't get right.

They advertise great industry connections, promising feedback from professionals and interesting talks, but we got absolutely none of that. We didn't have a single talk from anyone working in the field all year. To make matters worse, they don't even give you the licenses for the software you need. You have to fork out your own money for eye-wateringly expensive programs they force you to use.
There’s absolutely no uni life here either, so don't expect to feel part of any kind of community.

Honestly, it’s a shambles. You're paying a massive amount of money for a few hours of unfinished classes and then you're left on your own. Do yourself a favour and look elsewhere. Don't waste your time and money here.

Prior to trying out a course, I had seen the whistle-blower's warnings, the questionably grandiose bios, the worrying signs of hate-groups, the marketing styles etc. but I decided to give it a go despite these warning signs.

The lessons appeared to be the tutor reselling free tutorials to inexperienced students, often copying them word-for-word as his own and seeing these free resources as a business opportunity. It also seemed clearly aimed at attaining a similar guru image and position of power through copycat methods and pseudointellectual and elitist jargon. Some of this can be seen the unusual "meet the masters" and "obey the masters" type verbiage common here as part of the organisation's culture.

The rest of study time was the tutor being very friendly to young female students through frequent "feedback sessions" and conditioning the students through the coercive persuasion and targeted bullying. The end result is the large majority these mouldable personalities disturbingly worshipping the tutor(s) and establishment, even so far as to all doing salute emojis. The organisation seems to intentionally cultivate mob mentality.

Another way was to mislead youngsters with constant slick but misleading talks of grandiose corporate experience. This aligns itself with the marketing style of Escape studios, which often seemed to attract those with similar influence-based motivations and personalities.

As someone who did an industrial design science degree, I noticed another technique constantly passed onto students was to use misleading "design" academic jargon to compensate for worrying level of understanding in both form and function and lack of interest in creative pursuits seen in both tutor and student work. Misleading "design process" and associated techniques were added to make work appear developed and intellectual regardless of basic visual understanding. I found this unusual compared to people i've seen and worked with outside of here. All students had no self-learning or experience mainly limited these taxpayer/parent funded courses so the lessons were extremely basic albeit dogmatic due to the needs of the above. Students are constantly told to do things such as befriend industry contacts for career gain and no one bats an eyelid.

The students on other courses didn't seem the same, but due to the tutor's advertisements and the similar enjoyment of extremely violent power-fantasy games, this course seemed to contain similar interests. One in particular was an online short-course student usernamed "sakurachaek" a similar gamer who had a nasty online-game abuse style. What was also telling that this organisation gave admin powers to someone with username "01arin" with a bio containing similarly questionable rap lyrics. This user uses their position to silence dissent or complaints of these hate activities as "hate speech" - an internet user who has climbed the rungs of this groups ladder enough to have large influence over the mob.

I have written a complaint about the organisation to them which they have ignored, instead heeding to retaliatory complaints and then suddenly using the admin system to send me legal threats over payments they are not owed as I withdrew from the course following their own written and verbal cooling-off period agreement, which they tried to cover-up with deleting.

I recommend listening to initial warning signs and exercise extreme caution if employing from this particular organisation.