The Escapists (iOS) Review

Strict routines mixed with guards throwing insults, and mundane repetitive tasks - yup, prison life might sound like an extremely boring concept to form a video game around. At first it truly feels this way as all of these schedules seem to really limit the experience and prevent what seems to be the meat and goal of it all: the prison break. After a while though, the whole thing along with the planning truly starts to grow on the player until the point where the daily work shift becomes part of what makes the experience fun and entertaining, but let's not get ahead of time here.

It is important to stress that the first hour of The Escapists might be one of the most tedious hours spent in gaming getting to learn the system, and to understand the general purpose. It is very easy to get fooled into believing that most of the deal will take place during an epic escapist scene as taken from a grand Hollywood movie, which is heavily hinted at by the title of the game, and the extremely unpedagogical tutorial, which takes place during this long planned prison break.

It is understandable that the developer wants to show of the most exciting part of the game first, as there is a saying that if a game fails to hook the player within the first 30 minutes he/she is not likely to ever return to it. This is true, and The Escapists does a great disservice towards itself by having a tutorial that covers what the average person will do during like 1% of the gameplay. After this fast paced tutorial, the player character wakes up to realize the prison break was just a dream, and here is where the real thing begins, and frankly, it is nothing at all like the tutorial.

The first thing to do is to go to the morning roll-call where the guards will lecture the prisoners about their attitude towards them which is an excellent display of over exaggeration for humoristic purposes done right, and then it is time to go and eat breakfast where the prisoners will complain about how terrible the prison food is and after that there is some free time followed by lunch and then some work which is just as mundane as experienced by a "prison work," and after that there is some free time followed by training and a shower that does a perfect job at balancing the classical prison shower jokes with decency to create a humoristic yet non offensive atmosphere, followed by dinner, more free time and bedtime, just to rinse and repeat again and again.

It sounds fun, doesn't it? Yeah, it actually is quite the entertaining experience, but it is problematic and feels like a bore after the tutorial teasing about a big breakout, which, while actually the goal of the game is very unlikely, yet sometimes truly possible, to achieve early one during the game. The "meat" here is to prepare for it by living the prison life well, which is something that is a big contrast to the picture painted by the title and tutorial, especially since the latter does not help at all in understanding how to escape or even play.

Most of the first hour will be spent clumsily trying to get to the points where you are supposed to be, and maybe, just maybe, finish some quests for fellow prisoners for some coins or items that can be used to escape from the prison. After a while, it all will slowly start to grow on you, as you will slowly understand how to slightly break the rules without much consequence by doing it little at a time. After a while it will click that the free times can be used to get items to use to escape, that the roll-call are the perfect time to chat with fellow inmates and buy stuff, that the daily work can, with some tricks, be finished with extremely quickly creating more free time, and finally a plot to escape will enter the player's mind.

The problem is that the road to this enjoyment is long and rocky, and after the player has figured out the game enough to truly enjoy it, it will not last much longer. There will be some clever escapes, and there will be some discouraging failures, but after a while all prisons will quickly be escaped once the player knows how to play the game, and the joy of playing the system will go down, and they will quickly miss playing by the rules and do so for a while again just to figure out that it is a painful a lot like real life, and then go back to it.

The Escapists lets you escape to what most tries to escape to, the heavily over-scheduled reality. While it gives some psychological pleasure to break out of that system, the only reward is to get back into real life or into an even more heavily guarded prison with stricter schedules. You can never win with this game, and it is a clever metaphor for life, but not an entertaining one in the long run, and definitely not worth the initial annoyance of trying to figure it out.