Review cover Without Escape (Nintendo Switch)
Official GBAtemp Review

Product Information:

  • Release Date (NA): January 16, 2020
  • Release Date (EU): January 16, 2020
  • Publisher: Eastasiasoft
  • Developer: Bumpy Trail Games
  • Genres: Adventure
  • Also For: Computer

Game Features:

Single player
Local Multiplayer
Online Multiplayer
Co-operative

Review Approach:

When I saw this title available for review I knew I would be stepping outside of my comfort zone, and into something entirely different. Back in the '90s I had very few games to my name, and very few genres I would partake in, but these days I'm up for dipping my toe into almost anything. All of my school-time friends were exclusively into games like Ultima, Football Manager, Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, but I wasn't always fully satiated by these titles; I craved a bit more action and threw titles like Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem into my gaming mix. I love to flit between the lateral thinking and the ballistic. To date, Portal is still one of my all-time favourites for smooshing together the first-person shooting and puzzle genres.
Point-and-click is a genre that has been largely swept to the wayside thanks to the greater popularity of more casual, action-driven genres. I want to find out just how well this style of game works on Nintendo Switch. Let's dig in!
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<p><em>Without Escape</em> strikes me as a stripped-back blend of escape room style games like <em>The Room</em>&nbsp;series, and spooky&nbsp;haunted house, browser-based flash games. It looks simple enough, the premise of play is established straight away as requiring you to investigate the mysterious happenings in your house, and it is definitely easy to navigate. Effectively, you just use&nbsp;the left Joy-Con analogue stick to control the cursor,&nbsp;the A&nbsp;button for &quot;action&quot; and, crucially,&nbsp;the R button to bring up your inventory. This is all you need and it&#39;s a pleasure to see such a simplified control scheme in use, but it feels like more should have been done to incorporate more modern play styles to this type of game. Perhaps Wii-style motion&nbsp;controls for docked play, at least as an option, or definitely include touch screen controls to speed up the dragging of the cursor from one side of the screen to the other and to make items clickable immediately, without fiddling to get the analogue in the right spot.</p>

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<h3 class="blueHeader">[WARNING SOME SPOILERS AHEAD]</h3>

<p>You begin in your bedroom, you have just come home and devoured a frozen lasagne while your parents are out of town, when&nbsp;you hear a noise in the night that startles you. Your adventure begins with you checking your immediate surroundings for oddities, and lo&nbsp;and behold your clock has stopped, a painting on the wall is now crooked and there is a strange note by your bed. The obviousness of the clues leads you to form your plan of attack, but the necessity to follow the creator&#39;s precise chain of thought is immediately stressful. The note contained a phone number, so I wanted to locate a phone where I would dial it. Simple. The bathroom light was out so I needed to find a torch or something, obvious, and the wonky painting clearly needed rectifying but, inexplicably, I needed a tool for this mundane little task. At points, I thought perhaps this was all just a lasagne-cheese triggered fever dream and the creator had felt the need to string together some very random thoughts at the beginning to make this game eventually get to its final point. You dive downstairs, find the phone, dial the number and hear a weird noise.&nbsp;There is nothing much else to do here so you go back up to your room. Then, after hearing a loud noise, you fly back down to investigate and somehow, out of nowhere, a spirit level has been left next to the phone. Now I&#39;m no games designer but I thought this was a relatively odd item to find placed neatly by the phone, which had just pranked you, but I immediately knew its exact purpose. It seems that the designer had a few predetermined events they wanted to be included and had to mould the surrounding linked puzzles or items to make it fit. It feels strange, forced and ill-devised, yet it still makes you think along the lines the developer clearly wants you to think along. I cannot work out if it&#39;s actually intentionally genius, or bottom-of-the-barrel-scrapingly daft. Other incredibly bizarre incongruencies include having to use a jumper to fish something out of a toilet (obviously) and the most overwhelmingly annoying of all: the single-use lockpick. Why would you have such a versatile and useful item in a game where the majority of doors and drawers are locked, to then only be able to use it on one door, one time, and then it vapourises? I should also note that this is still&nbsp;your home, and the fact that the drawers and doors are inexplicably locked is jarringly odd too, so the second I got this item in my inventory I scanned through a mental list of all the locations I was going to blow wide open with this newfound bad&nbsp;boy, only to be cruelly let down after it wouldn&#39;t work on all but one of those places.</p>

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<p>Lateral thinking puzzles, and by that I mean making a connection between one item and the next task to tackle is one thing, but asking you to recall the atomic number of dysprosium in the middle of a chain of tasks is nigh-on impossible to do without having to entirely break from the game, Google the answer, and then come back with even less gusto than before. I didn&#39;t find that sort of puzzle enjoyable as much as it should have been. <em>Metal Gear Solid</em>&nbsp;did it best with the radio frequency on the rear box art; <em>Without Escape&#39;s</em> designer could certainly learn a few things from Mr. Kojima. While it was exciting to know that you had to find out that value somehow, it simply disjointed the experience. Why there wasn&#39;t simply a book or a computer that contained this information in-game is beyond me.&nbsp;There was, after all, a library-style study room littered with books and dotted with artefacts that go completely unused. A huge missed opportunity here for the continuation of immersion, and the ability to steer the player within this crafted space towards answers without forcing the player to ditch out of your game.</p>

<p>Once you get the nuances of this game, that the items are one-use, the puzzles odd, and the majority of background objects useless, things take a slight turn and the game gets grisly and gruesome. Your nice clean home morphs into this skin-crawlingly blood-spattered, lava-floored-dungeon of an oppressive hell hole which is certainly reminiscent of horror films like <em>Hellraiser</em> and the sort. The level of detail in the pre-rendered backgrounds is impressive, with some nice torture chamber and gothic looking locales, organic matter encapsulating and undulating throughout the house, minor details like blood stains, mould and rust on the surfaces. It&#39;s all very well-observed and well-rendered. At this point, this is where the game takes on more character, building on what is effectively its opening scenes and through horrific means, it eventually draws you in ready for its third act, where you will escape the house but not this nightmare. I don&#39;t want to go into too much detail or give too much away (in case you do wish to play this game) but this is really where the game gets interesting and you have a couple of new areas to explore and a few new puzzles to negotiate. Throughout the house sections of this title you have really been alone with your thoughts and interpreting the dialogue as your character&#39;s inner monologue, but progressing out of the house brings you to some forks in the road storywise and some disappointingly lacklustre dialogue between yourself and another entity really notches this game down and highlights the differences with some smaller titles versus studio-backed games that employ scriptwriters and vocal talent. If this game had a slightly bigger budget I think it could have been a really satisfying ending, but alas, it felt very deflating even before the final line of text. Games like this always show great potential for what could be the next title in the series, but unfortunately, this game doesn&#39;t live up to its description of &quot;enigmatic puzzles&quot; and it doesn&#39;t inspire you to want to play it much more than you really have to, so I&#39;m unsure if there would ever be a sequel, though I&#39;m sure it could certainly re-ignite the flame for other developers to jump aboard the point-and-click adventure train and flesh it out with more modern and interesting features.</p>

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<p>While I appreciate that <em>Without Escape</em> is clearly a labour of love from Bumpy Trail Games, and I applaud anyone who can conceptualise and build a game from start to finish, I just can&#39;t help but view it as someone&#39;s end of year project at university or a personal project in its infancy. I feel that while it hits all those &#39;90s point-and-click targets and really makes you reminisce about those games, there should have been some time set aside to take a step back and overlook the project as a whole for quality control and modernization. Frequented by annoyances such as pixel-perfect clicking required to find items in certain places, and the constant going back&nbsp;and&nbsp;forth to solve monotonous tasks, this game simply needed more time to prove itself and more air to breathe. I feel like I am being harsh when I say that for all intents and&nbsp;purposes it feels like a series of small part-puzzles chained together to make one long game, but with a clearly envisioned start and pre-defined ending.&nbsp;There is just a hugely muddy core which is unfortunately not very exciting to amble through repeatedly. Once you have completed your first playthrough and unlocked various FMV endings, you realise there are a few more things to uncover and easter eggs, but it&#39;s never much more than a chore of remembering how you did it before to re-endure it for a different ending.</p>

Verdict

What We Liked ...
  • Some interesting puzzles and locations
  • Lovingly crafted as seen in the developer diary extras
  • Multiple endings extend your adventure
What We Didn't Like ...
  • The Joy-Con control scheme is not ideal for pixel-accurate selection
  • No touch screen support
  • Single use items often make no sense
5
Gameplay
A quintessentially retro feeling point-and-click, with no jump scares, no voice acting, no lasting pizzazz. Quite obvious but gratifying puzzles meet obscure uses for items which frequently makes you think "Wait, that was a single-use item?!" Luckily, it's not a long graft to complete it, but even then it's a bit of a limp ending regardless of whichever path you follow.
6
Presentation
A love letter to the '90s point and click games. You have your traditional 3D pre-rendered backgrounds, with 3D objects to collect. Eventually, a distinctly gruesome aesthetic creeps in as the diametric opposite to the relative sanctuary of your own home. Well-defined and well-thought out areas, but some unintentionally ubiquitous details lead you to miss things as they're too small or not defined enough to stand out.
5
Lasting Appeal
Six endings and puzzles that slightly alter each time keep you entertained for more than one playthrough, but all in all once you have seen it all you can breeze back through it to pick off those additional endings very quickly. Around one hour of gameplay on the first run, and I guarantee that within four hours, you will have all of the endings and absolutely everything else sussed out.
5
out of 10

Overall

Quite a short game, but quite a compelling one. Without Escape captures some of the magic of the '90s and brings it to your Switch, however it misses a few key ingredients to make this an essential purchase.
Outside the game trivia (assuming I am not playing a trivia game) and the like I tend to find hard to do well and best left to easter eggs, crazy mysteries within a game or bonus levels. Fez probably being my go to example of that one.

Guess I will do a replay of 7th guest and/or 11th hour instead.
 
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Review cover
Product Information:
  • Release Date (NA): January 16, 2020
  • Release Date (EU): January 16, 2020
  • Publisher: Eastasiasoft
  • Developer: Bumpy Trail Games
  • Genres: Adventure
  • Also For: Computer
Game Features:
Single player
Local Multiplayer
Online Multiplayer
Co-operative

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