You start in your cell, just another orange jump-suited inmate with dreams of escaping. Populating your new prison home is a large cast of cons and guards, each with their own routine, inventory and attributes. Every now and then one of your fellow jailbirds will pop up with a little task for you. Performing these minor tasks earns you cash, with which you can buy necessary items for your escape from fellow inmates with a entrepreneurial side. On a basic level you might just need to grab some talcum powder or a comb, but the more violent members of the populace might instead ask you to distract the guards at dinnertime by starting a punch-up, or some other more dangerous task.
 |
Don't expect any real bloodshed. This isn't Oz , it's a very light-hearted look at prison life, with zany capers and Great Escape -style hijinks rather than drug abuse, Neo-Nazi gangs and messy shankings. The cute pixel art style does a lot to make the occasional prison beating less harrowing, and the game thankfully avoids the darker side of incarceration. The lighter tone stretches to some nice, pop culture-heavy nuggets of dialogue from the prison's inhabitants, which add a little character to a largely story-free game.
What The Escapists does particularly well is simulate the rigid structure of prison life. You start off with a paid job in the prison launderette, and each day follows an almost identical schedule that you'll need to stick to in order to avoid the guards' attention; morning roll-call follows breakfast, follows work, follows hour-long physical exercise. If you're lucky you might sneak off to the library (reading books raises your intelligence statistic, allowing you to conceive and build better gear), exercise or, if you have something more nefarious in mind, sneak off out of sight to work on that.
Not being entirely in control of your time adds a welcome risk/reward element to proceedings – the last thing you want is to be caught skipping out on your assigned work. Doing so will lose you your job at best, and earn you a beating or a cell inspection at worst. Getting sent to sickbay will remove any contraband items hidden on your person, while a cell inspection might uncover that secret tunnel you've been working on. At that point it's another twenty-stretch added to your sentence and the end of all your grand plans.
 |
I like the constant attention you have to play to your plot. The developer promises various methods of escape, but I concentrated on digging a hole under the prison fence from my jail cell. Fairly simple in concept, but there are countless things you have to worry about. Firstly, digging creates dirt. You have to dispose of this dirt, and that's often easier said than done. A certain amount you can stick down the toilet, but that still leaves sackfuls more of the stuff to get rid of – ultimately you end up scurrying around the prison, hiding mud in people's lockers and in desk drawers while constantly trying to keep on the good side of Officer Johnson in case he brains you with his truncheon and finds half the prison's foundation filling your pockets.
After you've looted various bits and pieces from around the prison you can do a bit of crafting to refine them into better gear. Adding a razorblade to a comb makes a comb blade, for example. Diabolic genius! Scattered around the complex are various pages that give you new crafting recipes, though you can muddle through by just guessing what will work; this largely involves duct-taping a pointy bit to a long thin bit, in classic prison tradition. I've cobbled together a few bits of gear, including pickaxes for mining and wooden supports for reinforcing my escape tunnel, but I'm sure there's a tonne of other goodies to build and experiment with.
 |
Using those custom-made weapons isn't as gratifying as it could be, because combat's a bit of a weak point, all told. You press a button to switch between passive and aggressive modes of interaction, then simply wail on someone until either he falls over or you do. It's not hugely satisfying, but then it isn't really the focus of the game. There's a 'heat' metre in the top left corner that tracks how suspicious of you the guards are, so you can avoid a beating by running off and hiding somewhere quiet should you need to. After a while the prison staff essentially forget what you've been up to, which isn't especially realistic, but does give you a little leeway should things go south.
After several hours with The Escapists , I've still not really got a good handle on the game. It's one you'll have to really get to grips with over several hours, working out all its little idiosyncrasies and learning new tricks and key strategies as you go. Constantly getting caught in the act, then screaming and running around with a sharpened toothbrush until you get truncheoned into insensibility by sixty-five pissed off guards is entertaining enough, but with little help from the game besides the occasional routine side-quest it's a little too easy to get confused as to what exactly you should do next. Despite moments of frustration, however, the pixel art and excellent soundtrack do a great job in setting the atmosphere, and the game has a great base concept that encourages exploration and improvisation. The planned addition of more maps, more items and more ways to make your escape can only be a good thing. One to keep an eye on as it edges closer to a full release later this year.
Most anticipated feature: I'd like to see what other escape options there are besides digging a big tunnel under your cell. Could we maybe start a prison riot, then escape in the ensuing madness dressed as a prison guard...? I'm already planning tactics.
