The Escapists
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.
PC