The Escapists: Complete Edition Review for Nintendo Switch

Mouldy Toof Studios’ sandbox prison break simulator The Escapists: Complete Edition is now available for the Nintendo Switch. The game’s pixel art style remains as colorful and charming as it did in 2015, if not a bit better, and with all of the game’s DLCs built in there’s plenty of content to play with. For those interested in this quirky hybrid of puzzle, stealth, and simulation gameplay, The Escapists should provide several hours of entertainment.

The Escapists allows players to choose from a list of different prisons that their avatar will be dropped into. Initially there’s only one standard prison available (you have to escape each one to unlock the rest), but the DLC prisons are conveniently unlocked from the get go as well. The developers were smart to do this as the variety of prison locations and scenarios is a large portion of The Escapists’ appeal. Some of the locales are quite exotic: a snowy prison camp resembling a much friendlier Soviet gulag, Alcatraz Island, the Tower of London, a prison buried in dense jungle, and even a strange version of Santa’s workshop in which the player becomes an elf trying to escape jolly St. Nick’s sweatshop labor.

More than just the prisons’ visual flair, the different locations and styles of prisons (ranging from easygoing county penitentiaries to merciless supermax prisons) offer their own challenges to work around and overcome. The snow prison camp has a double fence, one of which is electrified, so any escape plan that calls for cutting your way out also needs to include shutting down the prison’s generator. The jungle compound has an additional guard at a security booth outside the main facility; he won’t let you pass without forging some official documents first. The Escapists does a good job of making each new prison feel pretty differently from the last, although the core gameplay loop is often very similar.

Every prison has a schedule for the inmates to follow, which gives the game its simulation flavor. There’s a clock ticking at the top of the screen, along with a message dictating what the current time period is intended for. If you wander off during morning roll call or don’t show up for lunch, for example, your prisoner will generate suspicion from the guards. Too much suspicion and they’ll start pursuing you or even have the snipers in the guard towers start taking potshots at you. Much of the game involves loosely following the daily schedules of the prisons while scrounging for useful materials to craft various tools.

Materials are primarily acquired by looting the desks of other inmates or buying items off of inmates for cash. The items found in desks or merchant prisoners changes daily and is random. This creates an odd tension between freedom (not knowing what you’ll find will theoretically add more dynamism to escaping each time you play) and repetitive tedium (once you’re working on a particular escape you’re going to need specific materials, and if they’re not readily available you just have to wait until they are). There are also items that are always useful to the extent that you’ll nearly always pursue them, like the different keys carried by guards. Keys can’t always be stolen outright unless you can escape within minutes, otherwise the guards will catch on and you’ll be immediately caught. So you must forge the key by first knocking out the guard carrying it, then applying the key to some putty (which you crafted ahead of time, naturally) to create a mold. Then you plant the key back on the guard’s unconscious body and craft some molten plastic to fill your new key mold, producing a plastic key that will get you through doors of its corresponding color a limited number of times.

The process of learning a new prison often involves stealing a few keys, and possibly a uniform, in order to gain access to locked off areas while strategizing your escape route. It’s always a very similar process: craft useful weapon(s) to knock out guard(s), copy their key(s), explore during lights out or when nobody is watching until a clear path to the outside world can be envisioned. There are other methods of escaping, of course, but many will involve stealing keys to some extent. You can initiate a prison riot and simply walk out the front door, but you first need enough duct tape and/or rope to tie up every guard in the prison after knocking them all unconscious. Always you will be searching for needed materials, or performing odd jobs for the prison or other inmates in order to generate some money to purchase the items instead. The exploration and escape planning is where the fun is at, the more common phase of gathering materials and waiting for useful items to appear so you get to attempt your big escape can be much more monotonous.

The waiting process, which is most of the actual gameplay, involves interacting with other inmates and improving your prisoner’s strength, speed, and intelligence by exercising and reading books or Internet pages while passing time. Other inmates will occasionally offer simple quests with cash and opinion rewards: Go steal X from Prisoner Y; Bring me a Z; Start a ruckus during breakfast, etc. Since money’s only purpose is to either buy desired items, should they be present in a merchant inmate’s inventory, or giving it away to boost somebody’s opinion of you, the only reason to do quests after a short while is to get more friendly prisoners. Friendly prisoners can be asked to follow you around or beat up targets you give them. This can be convenient for getting access to an unconscious prisoner’s inventory without him losing opinion of you, or for setting up a prison riot. Otherwise, the quests don’t offer much of a distraction from the doldrums of carrying out your prison schedule until you can finally get that exotic feather needed to forge some ID papers. Getting too bold with your exploration or secret tunnel in the wall of your cell will attract the guards’ attention, and if they discover what you’re doing they’ll confiscate all of your contraband items, and the resource gathering process will restart.

The Escapists isn’t a terribly deep game but it will provide several hours of puzzles and goofy mishaps as you make your way in and, eventually, out of its prisons. The fun lies in the exploration and creativity the player is allowed to employ when planning an escape. Actually getting the resources to execute that escape can be a more tedious experience at times, but for patient and methodical players the satisfaction of a well executed escape plan will likely be more than enough of a reward.

7/10

Here is The Escapists: Complete Edition Nintendo Switch Launch Trailer:

The Escapists: Complete Edition is available to download for Nintendo Switch for just $14.99 / £9.99 / 14,99 €.

Michael Schreiber

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I've been gaming for 22 years, ever since my mom picked up a secondhand NES, and I've played on just about every gaming platform out there since. I think video games are one of most innovative and artistic mediums in the world today, and I'm always curious how developers will surprise me next.

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