“When Prison Simulator Is Taken Too Literally…In The Worst Of Ways”

Man, this one could’ve been so much more fun than it actually ended up being. “The Escapists” tasks you with, well, escaping from various prisons. This involves a combination of planning your escape, leveling up stats for your character, and buying gear/necessary items. While the amount of different mechanics at first seems numerous, they actually just boil down to three things: grind your character by doing mundane chores, grind for money to buy gear/items that barely affect the world in a meaningful way, and figure out the one (possibly two) methods of escape within a level. Instead of being a bit of a sandbox with its gameplay, this title decides to be more like a puzzle game - something I was not a fan of by a long shot.

Figuring out a way to escape seems fun at first, but you will notice the lack of opportunities in the first set of levels. Things will be both incredibly vague in terms of how to progress, but also super linear. Thus, instead of feeling like a prison simulator where you come up with creative escapes, you instead are completing a convoluted puzzle where it takes far too long to find pieces. Training your character feels like a chore because you literally complete simple tasks/chores in order to level up! That involves working out, working in the laundry room, eating food, sleeping, etc. You also earn money by doing various fetch quests, and these are pretty sub-standard in terms of fun. Overall, the gameplay loop just fails to be very compelling, and the rest of the experience isn’t very strong to back it up…

Presentation isn’t very great, and the graphical quality at first seems fine since it's stylized to be a retro game. The issue I have with this is the simple and repetitive loop you have to complete over and over again, and this becomes tiresome when you also have to see some really simple graphics in the background. The music is nothing to scoff at either, and it tends to just loop itself over and over. The menu interface is fine, but honestly there isn’t enough to pick the game up from its weak gameplay.

In my opinion this game just doesn’t have a very fun gameplay loop. It involves a lot of mundane training, completion of tedious tasks for other NPC’s, and some trial-and-error. If you’re caught by security, you’ll have to re-gather items collected and likely have to replay some of the levels as well. If there was more freedom allowed, then I could see the appeal of a prison escape sandbox being fun. However, a puzzle game within a prison with these specific mechanics was not interesting enough, so I would Not Recommend it.

Final Verdict: 2/10 (Bad)