There’s a reason prison breaks happen far more often in fiction than reality: these places really don’t mess around. Nor, despite what its cute graphics may suggest, does The Escapists. It’s hardly a realistic simulation of life behind bars – with the prisoners quoting everything from famous movies to Breaking Bad – but it’s a fiendish little mix of sandbox and puzzle game whose six prisons take no prisoners. Metaphorically speaking, anyway…
It’s a game that looks like Prison Architect’s black-sheep brother, but plays about as a regimented sandbox to first be controlled by, and then to subvert. Morning roll-call is time for everyone to gather and be told the business of the day, including whose cells are about to be inspected for contraband. Soon I realized it’s also a great time to sneak into other prisoners’ cells and carefully pocket anything good from their stash. Social times like dinner, meanwhile, offer a chance to chat with other prisoners, recruit assistance, and collect mini-quests like retrieving someone’s stolen DVD or causing a scene during the next roll-call.How much you appreciate the result will primarily depend on two factors: whether you like being left alone to figure out what to do, because the basic tutorial covers very little of what you need to know to actually escape one of the real prisons, and how annoying this repetition is going to be over time. It takes a long series of days to gather and assemble the bits that you need for an escape, and it’s easy to lose all the important ones with just the slightest mistake. You can only save at the start of each in-game day, and while there’s no death, being taken out by a random prisoner deciding they don’t like your face, or a guard screwing up your plan at the last second, can make for an excruciating time-out and loss of hard-earned progress.
Each of the nine prisons offers a different-feeling challenge though, not to mention new settings, from minimum security with a cell conveniently located right by a service corridor, to a high-security facility for those who have officially transcended mere scamphood. The first has cable TV in all the rooms, the last has security cameras. Between them are a Stalag, Shankton State Pen, a jungle jail, and San Pancho, south of the border in a cloud of heat and anger. There are also currently three additional ‘custom’ prisons, including Camp Epsilon, where all cells have mesh walls for an extra-special lack of privacy and most prison life is out in the open.
Mechanically of course, the goals are the same: find a weakness, and exploit it. Much of this revolves around crafting, which in a continuation of a frankly irritating current trend just assumes that you’ll go to a wiki to find out that, say, papier mache is made by combining toilet paper and superglue. It’s hard to plan when you don’t know what a game has actually planned for, especially when the character needs to hit an intelligence threshold to make so much as a glob of sticky paper. Providing the standard useful recipes up front would have been handy.
Much of The Escapists is about getting the items that you need to conduct a breakout - at its simplest, a Shawshank-style dodge like finding a tool to break through a wall, a poster to hide the evidence from the screws until it’s too late. You can buy both legal and contraband items from fellow prisoners, as well as get jobs around the prison that provide access to heftier things. The laundry shift, for instance, is a great way of getting your hands on a guard uniform, even if sensors on the door make stealing one a little harder than just walking off. If someone else has the job you want, well, that’s what sharpening a comb on a wall to make an impromptu shank is for. The risk, of course, is that they’ll later return the favour at the worst possible time, and lead to all your hard work turning into a spell in the infirmary/solitary.More Reviews
Verdict
As a mix of sandbox, puzzle and open-world action, The Escapists offers something fresh and entertaining. The nature of what it’s simulating leads to some annoyances and careful handwaves to keep things light, but with both enough space between those moments to feel like I was actually producing my own plan and enough tools that I didn’t just feel like I was looking for a conveniently pre-packaged solution. It’s a clever game that’s not afraid to be challenging, and a very enjoyable puzzle if you don’t mind it also being a touch vague, often repetitive, and happy to quickly get as hard as figuring out an actual prison break.
