#THE ESCAPISTS SWITCH HOW TO#
#THE ESCAPISTS SWITCH SERIES#

From there it’s entirely up to you how to do it. That’s the one and only direction the game gives you. As is obvious, you’re an inmate in a prison, and your goal is to simply escape. The game itself, for people who haven’t played it before, is clean, but feature rich. This feature is a limited in execution and light-on with the actual cooperative elements, so it’s difficult to come up with truly fiendish strategies for escape (and none of the prisons are built to reward that anyway), but there’s still a fundamental thrill in working with other players around a centralised plan. Now, just like in Prison Break, you’ll be able to form a crew, each with their own ideas on how to go about breaking out, and you’ll be able to work cooperatively to make that happen. The second enhancement that really helps The Escapists 2 outperform its predecessor is the multiplayer mode. It’s still not perfect, and there were some levels where I could see things I would like to try, but just couldn’t because the engine wouldn’t let me, but nonetheless, The Escapists 2 welcomes and encourages experimentation. That, in turn, gives it more character and personality as you’ve got a greater range of ways to put yourself in the experience. More options means more unique strategies, which makes The Escapist 2 the better canvas with which to draw your story out. The first is that there are more ways to plan out an escape. With that in mind, The Escapists 2 has two specific strengths over its predecessor. With each prison break, the narrative comes from the sandbox, open-ended nature of the game and the fact that each player will devise their own unique escape strategy.

Your own character is a mute, blank slate. There’s a lot of humour in the interactions and snippets of dialogue that go on around you as you carefully scope out the prison and devise a plan to escape, but each NPC character in each prison is interchangeable – little more than a resource to be utilised in the prison escape if you so choose to. There’s very little character on display in The Escapists 2. To use Prison Break as an example again, what made that show so compelling was the way that it brought numerous personalities together and how each of them used their own characteristics to contribute to the overall escape effort. From there, the prison break itself becomes a thrilling puzzle of the mind and exploration of the personality. “We are captives of our own identities living in prisons of our own creation,” – this quote from Prison Break summarises the way prisoners are portrayed in most prison. Instead, the fantasies that we conjure around prisons make the prison experience a reflection on the person. You’ll notice that very few prison break stories deal with the ramifications of what comes next when prisoners (who are not wrongfully accused) go on the run. At the end of the day, however, were you to ask people a simple question in isolation “would you rather there be prisons, or no prisons?” most people would accept the need for incarceration.īut in the realm of fantasy, and the process of turning the prison into an exotic location that we aren’t familiar with, there’s no need to consider what prisoners in the real world are really like, or how they interact with the rest of society. Certainly it’s not a failproof system, with people being mistreated in there, others being wrongly sent to prison in the first place, and the close relationship between the prison system and various cultural strains of racism that run through our (western) societies. The point of a prison is to put distance between us and those people who society cannot trust not to harm it. In the real would, of course, we don’t want prisoners to escape. Often escape is the core theme of the story. A game that lets us indulge that fantasy – when there aren’t that many of them – was always going to appeal to a large number of people.

#THE ESCAPISTS SWITCH SERIES#

A prison is something that we all hope we’ll never actually experience by ourselves, and yet and the same time it has become a topic of fantasy, with a nearly endless series of films, TV shows, books and stories crafted about them. The original Escapists was nothing short of a runaway success (over four million units sold, apparently), and with good reason. Related reading: Harvard’s review of The Escapists 2 on PlayStation 4

The escapists switch