The Escapists: Complete Edition

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

The Escapists is a Top-Down Action-RPG that places you in the role of a prisoner looking to bust out of prison.

You’re not really given any story, not given much direct instruction, and not even all that much of a tutorial. You get just enough to know the basic controls of the game, and then left to your own devices to figure out how to escape.

This, in my opinion, is this game’s biggest problem. While The Escapists goes into a great amount of detail in setting this game up as a sandbox, with plentiful options for ways to go about your escape, it doesn’t do very much to let players know just what those options are. In fact, at every opportunity to convey information to the player, this game seems to want to make this as frustrating an experience as possible.

You quickly learn that the prison has a routine that you’re expected to follow… sometimes. There are times when your actions and movements are relatively freer than others, but the game doesn’t really let you know what times are more regimented and how that works. Do you have to just show up for meals? Do you have to be there only for the end? And what’s the penalty for missing this, or any other scheduled activity?

The answer to that last question generally comes in the form of “heat”, which amounts to how much the prison guards distrust or outright dislike you… but again, the consequences of this aren’t really spelled out. It’s clear that this goes down over time, but just how much do players need to worry about it rising? At what point can it cause problems? What are those problems? Barring a look over on a FAQ or guide, players will likely be left stumped as to many of this game’s questions like this.

More importantly, there’s the tools players can gather in the prison, either from directly dealing with other inmates or stealing from them or their cells. This is clearly how you get what you need to make your escape, using the game’s crafting system… but again, the game completely drops the ball by not letting players know just what they can craft with their items, or what is needed to craft, say, a shovel.

Heck, even the game’s text is frustratingly tiny and difficult to read. It’s as if the game wanted to do everything it could to make understanding how to play it as hard as possible.

The Escapists does have one nice quality, and that is its charmingly retro graphics design, which seems straight out of the NES/SNES era, and this acts as a nice counter-point to how complex the stuff under the surface is.

On the Nintendo Switch, we get the Complete Edition of the game, which includes all previous DLC, as well as the exclusive Fhurst Peak prison, which is exclusive to this version of the game, making this the definitive version of the game.

However, despite these positive features, I just felt like my entire experience with The Escapists was one of frustration. It’s clear that there’s a lot that you can do in this sandbox of a game, but the game does a horrendously poor job of letting players know what their options are and how the various game systems at work here actually function. If you’re the sort of person who will enjoy tinkering around with a game to figure out how it works, or the sort who likes just looking up all the answers online, you might find some enjoyment here, but for most this one should be skipped.

tl;dr – The Escapists: Complete Edition is the definitive version of the Top-Down Action-RPG that puts you in the role of a prison inmate seeking to bust out of jail. The game has a wealth of options and complex systems at work to give players plenty of possibilities for enacting their escape, but unfortunately at every turn the game does a terrible job conveying to players what those options are and what those systems mean. The result is a game that’s just frustrating.

Grade: C-

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