'Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions' Clip: Escape Rooms Are Making A Deadly Comeback – Again

Escape rooms are making a comeback— and they're even more life-threatening than you remember!

A sequel to 2019's Escape Room is coming to theaters later this month, once again gathering a group of strangers and forcing them to work their way through a series of deadly puzzles. The first movie was especially lethal, leaving only two survivors in its wake, but Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is going for the gold. Based on the latest clip, the rooms have become even more dangerous and complex.

Check out the newest clip from Escape Room: Tournament of Champions below.

You might have noticed that Escape Room: Tournament of Champions features a couple of familiar faces. Returners Zoey Davis (Taylor Russell) and Ben Miller (Logan Miller) managed to survive each of the puzzles from Escape Room and have the misfortunate of being caught up once again. Luckily, they aren't alone, and their newest companions are already familiar with the deadly puzzle rooms. The villainous corporation Minos Escape Rooms has found a way to gather its survivors in an intense tournament of past champions.

As we see in the clip, these puzzles promise to be much more difficult than the first. This time around, they weren't designed for amateurs but for the very best of the deadly escape room niche. But even if all of these people have survived Minos once before, who's to say if they can do it again?

At the very least, they're much better suited than the last movies group: they begin the bank room by springing into action, pairing off, and searching for clues. We can expect less of their initial panic since they're already so familiar with what's at stake. The champions remember these Saw-like circumstances like the back of their hands because they've already lived them once before.

Wasting no time, they each talk through the riddle, connecting the blank bills to the words repeated over the loudspeaker. In a matter of seconds, they realize the bills must be soaked in blood – and just as things start coming together, the Game Master ramps up the stakes. Lasers erupt from all angles of the room and both Zoey and a newcomer fall back into them. But it looks like we won't be getting answers on who survives until the movie's debut in theaters.

The first Escape Room was a delightful surprise. It was nothing like we haven't seen before, a wild amalgamation of Saw, Final Destination, and the much more PG Maze Runner. Adam Robitel's Escape Room movies are fun with puzzles that are largely life-threatening and occasionally traumatizing. They promise everything from giant ovens and upside-down billiards to hospital rooms filling with poisonous gas and yes, a bank safe filled with lasers.

The first Escape Room didn't come together perfectly, but it was still plenty of fun all the way through. Perhaps Escape Room: Tournament of Champions has figured out how to marry 90 minutes of fun intrigue with its overly complicated ending concept. Either way, it looks like we can hope for more of the same, dialed up a few hundred notches.

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions releases in theaters on July 16, 2021.