The Escapists is an interesting indie game from developer Mouldy Toof Studios. The game gives you the opportunity of experiencing life behind bars while doing your best job to stage an elaborate breakout. This isn’t a serious simulation, but it does give one an idea of how a prison situation could function theoretically function.
The Escapists is a neat project that plays a little bit like The Sims, a little like those escape the room games, and a bit like your favorite rogue like. But above all your main objective is to escape your prison in a multitude of clever ways.
While the games gives you a tutorial that makes things seem like they are going to be a walk in the park, once the game opens in earnest you’ll find yourself struggling to break out of even the most basic of prisons. It’s almost as if the tutorial is too basic that you won’t really be learning how things really work in game. I really would have liked to be able to learn and explore more aspects of the game before being tossed in almost blind. The tutorial is a walk in the park that takes maybe five-minutes, yet the first prison you escape can run you hours upon hours to complete.
While escaping is your number one priority, you’ll be hard-pressed to find the time required to complete that task. As this is a prison, things tend to run on a very strict schedule. You’ll have to be at morning and evening roll-call sessions as well as meals and other daily scheduled events/activities. Take too long getting to any of these and the guards will be quick to put you in your place.
Players will have to learn the certain routine that each prison has in order to prepare for their eventual escape. Learning the daily routines of the prison will entail watching guards and how they patrol and learning the details of your fellow inmates in order to find the perfect opportunity to escape. Distracting and/or misdirecting guards can play to your advantage not just for an escape, but to buy you time if you need to search through inmates cells.
Escaping isn’t going to come easy if you fly solo, so you are going to have to use other inmates to help you escape. The Escapists will throw a number of randomly generated tasks from other inmates that will in-turn earn you cash that you can spend. As this is prison, all your deals will be on the black market, so be careful not to get caught with contraband on your person while to go about your “business”. While you’ll only be able to hold a few items on your person, your desk will serve as your main stash point, but you’ll have to juggle what you keep in there as guards will randomly choose two inmates every morning and perform a sweep of their living quarters. Sometimes these sweeps will be unannounced during the day which can ruin a meticulously laid out plan in an instant.
While you live out your day inside, you’ll also have to build yourself up both physically and mentally. Strength and speed can be built by lifting weights or running the treadmill during gym time, intellect can be upped by spending time on the PC browsing the internet (this has to be a foreign prison), and you’ll also have to keep yourself fed and cleaned. As the game runs at an accelerated pace you will always be moving and doing something, so planning your escape sometimes falls by the wayside.
Do you take the job in the laundry room and risk stealing a guards uniform or play it safe and try for a better job with better rewards? Do you bide your time amassing a plethora of tools and risk a sweep or run a plan with only the basics? For a game that is locked to such a small place, The Escapists feels much bigger than it is. But don’t think is all serious all the time as the games inmates and guards are all highly opinionated and spout some nice one-liners. It keeps things light and helps keep The Escapists from becoming too dark and serious in nature.
All this so far sounds pretty great, but The Escapists isn’t without out its faults. Functionally the game works as intended, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a whole lot of fun after playing for a little while. Very quickly while playing I found the core of the gameplay wearing thin on me with the amount of repetition involved. I get that this is a prison setting and things run on a clock, but when a full day plays around ten to fifteen minutes, you’ll be seeing a lot of the same thing over and over.
Another issue is the lack of punishment, which is strange as you’d figure a prison would be a stickler for that sort of thing. If you attack a fellow inmate in the line of sight of a guard, you’ll get a beat-down that will land you in the infirmary in a Grand Theft Auto manner. The problem with this is that you don’t lose out on anything other than losing the weapon you used and any contraband you had on your person. Even this loss isn’t a big deal as you’ll be able to get everything back in short order by taking in an assignment or two.
Inmate A might want inmate B beat up for some perceived infraction, if you go and knockout whoever this may be and win, you’ll be rewarded with some money. The inmate you beat up won’t even question what happened and go about their lives. The problem with the random nature of assignments from inmates is that there won’t be any tension built between prisoners.
The Escapists also puts a heavy focus on crafting (oh boy!), but does little in the way of teaching you who things work. Other than the soap in sock tool that I learned to make from playing the tutorial (that I couldn’t build until my intellect was high enough because me dumb guy) I rarely found other options that worked. When combining things you will more often than not find that nothing works, even when they would in the real world, or that your intellect isn’t high enough to put said bar of soap in sock. You’ll be better off just taking jobs and buying your gear instead of doing much of any crafting.
Combat is also as basic as it gets no matter the weapon you have on you. Just hit the space bar to prep your weapon and then click ala Diablo to dispatch your enemy. The 8bit style doesn’t offer a lot of detail, so this fighting will just look like two people bumping into each other. Sure, you can increase your speed and strength to make these encounters easier, but those stats will likewise be having you mash buttons to increase in rank. It’s so utterly basic that the entire game is built around a single action button(s).
Lastly, The Escapists, while giving you a number of ways to escape, will auto-fail you if you don’t play within the games rules. Steal a guards uniform and you can be guaranteed to be greeted with the games kill screen that sends you into solitary confinement. The things that you want to do to escape will often not be what the games wants you to do and lead to an automatic fail.
The Escapists is technically sound, but just doesn’t offer much in the way of fun. It’s a blast during the first few in-game days of play, but the game quickly becomes far too repetitive to keep many players entertained. Also, all the prisons are locked, so you are going to have to put up with the starter prison until you find a way out. While many will no doubt love this game (the reviews are incredibly positive) I just couldn’t find the lasting fun in the experience.
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