The Escapists Reviews
The Escapists is excellent at what it does, there's no doubt about that, and it's cornered a market that nobody else dares to touch. It's generous with content, it's deep, and, at times, it's extremely satisfying. Still, it can be very tedious, and as such, unless you're actually in prison and have time to kill, there are probably better ways to spend your limited gaming hours. If the premise intrigues you then by all means give it a go – otherwise, you may want to refrain from spending your time behind bars.
If you're going to buy The Escapists, do your research first and make sure you know what you're getting into.
Sometimes you're a rat in a cage. Sometimes you're a lion. But when all your planning, patience, and possibly plain old good luck finally pays off, The Escapists rewards in a rare way. Because in The Escapists, whether you catch a break or catch a beatdown, you'll know you've earned it.
The Escapists may look cute and lightweight, but it's a surprisingly deep sandbox RPG that punishes sloppiness and where players have a multitude of options in how they go about crafting their escape. Its learning curve is steep and hints are few and far between, but hey, that's life on the inside for you.
The Escapists is a break out success for Mouldy Toof studios. A must-play for indie gaming fans with a little patience.
The Escapists certainly has its times where it felt like Shawshank's river-crawl through crap, but each escape felt hard-earned and true enough to the point where we felt clean on the other side of its prison walls.
. The concept behind The Escapists is strong, and the strategy is there. But I move at my own pace and care more about the atmosphere of a game than its underlying machinery, and I wish I had a shallow end to wade in for awhile instead of getting hurtled off the high dive.
How can you go wrong with a game like The Escapists, a most wonderful and unique prison escape adventure title? Answer: you can't.
The Escapists has brought in hundreds of positive reviews, receives consistent updates, and can be downloaded and installed within minutes on Steam. With pixel art graphics and a fantastic soundtrack, it emulates the atmosphere of prison life while encouraging exploration and innovation from the players. If you have ever wondered how you would escape from a high security prison, this is your chance to see how strong your plot really is.
The Escapists is an entertaining open-ended puzzler that delivers plenty of challenge for those possessing the patience to overcome it.
The Escapists is an interesting game with very solid mechanics and enjoyable visuals. It can feel repetitive after a while and frustrating in certain moments.
What looks like a bright and breezy game turns out to be an incredibly stiff challenge that can occasionally be hugely rewarding. More often than not, however, The Escapists is about as pleasurable as a swift kick in the bollocks.
The Escapists is an interesting concept and one that works well as a game. The visual style’s colourful and cute nature juxtaposed with the violent and gritty subject matter gives the game a dark comedy vibe not unlike games like Worms and Flockers.
You're enjoyment while planning the big escape in The Escapists depends on how much you enjoy building out your own fun in a sandbox prison environment. Watching a plan unfold is undoubtedly satisfying, but putting the plan in motion can be tedious. According to the developers, the game will eventually allow gamers to create and share their own prisons, given you a reason to keep the game installed long after you've escaped the included eight prisons.
The concept of The Escapists—make friends, make enemies, make crazy tools, and escape from prison through any applicable deviancy—is easy to fall in love with. Reality, positioning The Escapists as a beautiful machine undermined by the gears assigned to power it, is more cruel.
Does The Escapists explore or expose anything the average person doesn't already know about prisons? I don't think so. It is a puzzle game, and if you enjoy puzzles and you have an extreme amount of patience, I would encourage you to check out The Escapists. If you're looking for a hard, or systemic, view on prisons, I would suggest looking elsewhere.
If you're looking for a very different, very open ended, very "freeing" game about jail breaks, The Escapists will appeal to the experimenter and escape artist in you. It's not going to hold your hand when it comes to enacting a brilliant escape from jail, but if you're willing to watch, plan and be patient it's a very rewarding—if demanding—game.
The Escapists is a game for a very niche audience, as it doesn't provide much in the way of variety to deliver enough entertainment for long periods of time.
I'm pretty sure this won't appeal to a lot of people. It can be bone-crushingly hard at times and difficult to get into. But by giving you the tools to craft your own escape and leaving you alone to sort it out, The Escapists is one of those classic hands-off games that encourages you to create your own story and incredible moments.
The Escapists set out to create a fun and realistic prison escape game, and it has done that with flying colours. The player will immediately sympathize for their inmate as they begrudgingly follow the prison's schedule, but then bask in the excitement as they start to plan their prison desertion. The three-step system of increasing your stats, getting better jobs and then crafting the items you need works wonderfully and creates a smooth and logical experience that anyone could enjoy and appreciate. However there are areas for improvement, one being a story that could tie all six prisons together which could help the player build up a connection with their inmate. Also, the game would benefit from a more in-depth tutorial than the one we see at the beginning of the game. Otherwise, like us, players may be lost at the start of their stint in prison and not entirely sure of how to go about forming some sort of escape. The Escapists doesn't quite reach the heights of The Shawshank Redemption's emotion, relationships between characters or interesting story to tie everything together, but it does create an engaging and noteworthy experience that should be played by all.