These change between prisons, which certainly shakes things up when it comes to planning different escapes between levels. These routines sound easy to manage, and while they are (for the most part), you may find yourself going through the motions and not actually making much in the way of progress towards your escape.
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Finally, there is dinner, evening free period, roll call and lights out. After this you have lunch and then, possibly, work (if you have a job), followed by exercise and showers. The routine starts in the morning, with roll call, then moves on to breakfast and a free period. The actual planning of the escape is something that has to be fitted in around your general existence inside the prison – the game would be too easy if you were just left to craft a way out without any risk of repercussions.
However, I can imagine this method of doing things will put some people right off the idea of playing past those first few hours. It’s hard for me to be entirely critical of this process because it makes the payoff of success all the more sweet. While this is how many games function in the early stages, certain elements of The Escapists mean that you could possibly lose hours of progress because of a rule or condition that you weren’t aware of.
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These things (crafting especially) are so key that a lot of what you do in the first few hours will be trial and error.
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Although following the routine of living in a prison is easy enough, and you’re given plenty of cues for bits that you encounter throughout a normal day, certain areas, such as crafting, trading goods and how to make nice with people that have taken a disliking to you, are all left out. You’re given some very basic bits to get you started, but that’s about it really. This ‘freedom’ right from the get-go is actually a little jarring, and unless you’ve got nothing else to play or have been really looking forward to this title, you may find the lack of a solid tutorial somewhat off-putting. That description sounds like a recipe for boredom, a concept crying out for a story, but kudos to Mouldy Toof Studios for not caving in and, instead, just allowing the game to exist in a state where the player could find it the most accessible – here’s a prison, break out of it.
There isn’t a story to speak of, you’re just in a sandbox that happens to be a prison… and what a sandbox it is.īeing locked inside a single environment in a videogame is pretty rare, by all accounts, even more so when there is a routine to follow and any transgressions are met with harsh punishments. Leaving the prison will ‘unlock’ the next level and, with it, greater challenges, more content and a higher difficulty. It doesn’t matter how you do it, when you do it or who you screw over along the way. The objective of any given prison is incredibly simple: you just need to ecape. If you can think of a prison-based cliché, chances are it’s thrown in here, and developers Mouldy Toof Studios have done everything they can to draw from a lot of different source material, mixing it in with their own creative ideas to generate a pretty compelling puzzle role-playing game. Except if you’re playing The Escapists, in which case it’s exactly like all that stuff I just mentioned and then some. It’s about doing your time, quietly, keeping out of everyone’s way and getting released back into the loving arms of your family. It isn’t all chipping away at brick walls, taking moulds of keys and doing other cons a favour in order to get in their good books. The Shawshank Redemption, Prison Break, maybe if you’re old enough, a little bit of Porridge or The Great Escape - chances are you’ve had some sort of exposure to what life isn’t quite like behind bars.
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