Edna & Harvey: The Breakout – Anniversary Edition

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in “Edna & Harvey” Bundle along with Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes. It is also included in Point’n’Click Lovers: Daedalic Adventure Bundle, along with Anna’s Quest, Children of Silentown, Deponia, Life of Delta, and The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav.)

Edna & Harvey: The Breakout is a Graphic Adventure first released on PC in Germany in 2008, taking three years to make the trip to English-speaking territories. The game would later release on mobile devices in 2012, and then remade as this Anniversary Edition, which released in 2019 on PC and was ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2020.

As for what this game is about, players take the role of Edna, a purple-haired young woman who finds herself in a padded room in what appears to be a mental institution, and alternately at times they’ll switch to her companion Harvey, a blue stuffed bunny that trades banter with Edna. Together, and with assistance from others in the facility, the pair will try to escape while occasionally taking trips into Edna’s past to help her regain her memory.

The game deals with some heavy topic matter, but is generally light and whimsical in tone, with plenty of snarky remarks by characters throughout the story. Jokes at the expense of those with mental illnesses may seem a bit more dated these days, especially when the game covers some pretty terrible and traumatic events, so players who might be sensitive to such topics should consider themselves warned.

The presentation in this game is pretty good, using hand-drawn 2D visuals in a goofy style clearly designed to imitate the look of classic LucasArts SCUMM Graphic Adventure games, with this particular version of the game updating the visuals with more detail and higher resolution for modern displays (though players who prefer can still opt to select the original look in menus). This is joined by a simple instrumental soundtrack that gets the job done but isn’t especially memorable, and voice acting for spoken lines that’s appropriately cartoonish and pretty good all-around.

While I have no qualms with the presentation, I do have some serious issues with the gameplay. It’s not all bad, though – this release reworks the original game’ inventory system, and has mostly-decent gamepad controls (sadly, no touchscreen controls though), and I appreciate the way the game highlights areas you can interact with, meaning you’ll have less guesswork to deal with, at least in this regard.

The problem is how tedious and at times nonsensical its puzzle design is. The opening room is a great start to this – wanting to break out of her padded cell, Edna must talk to the bars above the cell door multiple times to annoy a guard into engaging her in conversation, where the correct conversation path will reveal that an air conditioning vent is behind one of the dozen or so pieces of padding lining the walls. You can’t interact in any meaningful way with the padding, but must instead break off a chair leg from a chair, which is still useless until you break it on the bars above the cell door. Then you need to use it to slash every bit of padding until you find the right one, and then slash that bit of padding again to reveal the air conditioning unit behind it. The unit is inaccessible due to being screwed into the wall, but if you ask Harvey to look at it, he’ll take Edna into her memory, where…

Okay, I’ll just stop right there. So many problems, just in this first room. After talking to the bars once, there’s no indication that you’ll get any different response if you do it again. In the conversation with the guard, there’s no indication it will result in anything helpful unless you select the right conversation option, meaning you’ll have to go through all of them one by one until you find it. There’s no indication that the chair leg isn’t useful on its own, and that you need to break it, or how you’d do that. The padded walls all look the same, meaning you’ll be fiddling with all of them until you find the right one, wasting your time. Once you do slash the right one, there’s no indication that you need to do so again to continue. And when you see the air conditioning vent is screwed in, there is no logical way to know that your stuffed bunny will have anything productive to say or do about it.

As a result, making progress in this game means doing one of two things – looking up an online guide to see just what the heck you’re meant to do, or brute-forcing everything… and then brute forcing everything again because sometimes the game needs you to do things more than once, or something only works after you’ve done something else. It’s infuriating.

It’s also depressing, because if it wasn’t for this maddening gameplay, Edna & Harvey: The Breakout seems like it could actually be a pretty decent LucasArts-style Graphic Adventure game, with some decent humor, memorable characters, and a distinctive presentation. But this gameplay… ugh… it’s emblematic of the stuff I hate most about the Graphic Adventure genre, and I can’t recommend it when there are countless other entries in the genre on Nintendo Switch that don’t make you suffer through this terrible gameplay.

tl;dr – Edna & Harvey: The Breakout is a Graphic Adventure about a young woman and her stuffed rabbit trying to break out of a mental institution. This game does a good job copying the style, tone, and humor of the great early LucasArts Graphic Adventure games, but the gameplay is tedious, frustrating, and at times nonsensical. Unless you’re a die-hard fan of the genre, you should skip this game.

Grade: C-

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