The Escapists is a strategy game about breaking out of prison, and its best idea is that it makes you live there first. Mouldy Toof Studios built a game where the escape plan is the point, but the daily routine is the game. It came to PC, PlayStation 4, Linux, Xbox 360 and Xbox One in 2015, after a Steam Early Access release in 2014. iOS and Android versions followed in 2017.
Six Prisons, One Routine
You play an inmate. The goal is to escape from six primary prisons, each harder than the last. Every escape unlocks the next one. Downloadable prisons sit outside that ladder and can be played in any order, whatever your progress.
The structure sounds simple. The execution is not, because the game buries its exits under a schedule.
Each day starts with you waking in your cell on day 1. From there you attend meals, work, exercise and showers. These routines exist to keep guards from getting suspicious. Skipping them has consequences you can manage. Roll calls do not bend. Miss one and the prison goes into lockdown.
That tension is the whole game in miniature. You are not sneaking past a guard in a corridor. You are deciding whether the risk of skipping laundry is worth the hour it buys you.
Favours, Opinion and the Payphone
Items are the currency of escape. You buy them, steal them from other inmates, or craft them by combining two or three together. Favours for fellow prisoners pay out money once completed, and that money buys items or tips from the prison’s payphone.
Favours range widely. Some ask you to distract guards during routines. Others want a specific item procured.
Then there is the opinion stat, which tracks how other prisoners feel about you. High opinion means inmates respect you and will fight on your behalf. Low opinion means they may attack you at random or snitch.
Players assume the role of an inmate and must escape from prisons of increasing difficulty.
That single stat does more work than most of the systems around it. It turns the prison population into a resource you have to maintain, not just a set of obstacles. A player focused entirely on the escape route will find the route closed by people they ignored.
Prison Editor and the Long Tail
Outside the main campaign there is a Prison Editor. It lets players build their own prisons from in-game assets and publish them online for others to download.
This is the part of The Escapists that has aged best. The six built-in prisons are a fixed puzzle. The editor turns the game into a platform, and the game’s own difficulty curve becomes something players can argue with by building their own.
Where the Game Fights You
Reviewers praised the freedom of approach the game offered. Some were frustrated by the trial-and-error required to learn its systems.
Both reactions are correct, and they describe the same design choice. The Escapists rarely tells you what it wants. You learn the rules by breaking them and watching what happens. That is satisfying when a plan comes together and tedious when you are re-running a day for the fourth time because a guard’s patrol did not go where you assumed.
The game also spreads itself thin. It carries puzzle, role-playing, simulator, strategy, tactical, adventure and indie labels, and the bird’s-eye isometric view keeps you at a distance from a premise that is fundamentally about tension. You are managing a schedule, not feeling one.
The comedy theme lands better than the stealth one. Everyday prison life played light is the game’s actual register, and it works.
What the Score Buys
The Escapists earns its 6.9 of 10. It is a smart, generous game with a real idea at its center: that the escape is only interesting if the prison is a place you actually inhabit. The routine system, the favour economy and the opinion stat all pull in that direction, and the Prison Editor gives the whole thing a second life beyond the campaign.
What holds it back is the learning curve. Trial and error is a legitimate way to teach a systems game, but The Escapists leans on it harder than it needs to, and the frustration is baked in rather than optional. The isometric distance does not help. For a game about being locked up, it is oddly cool to the touch.
A sequel, The Escapists 2, arrived in 2017. A Nintendo Switch version of the original, with all downloadable content included, came in 2018. The game reached the Epic Games Store on 23 September 2021 as part of the weekly free game campaign.
That 2021 free run matters more than it looks. The Escapists is at its best when there is a crowd of prisons to browse and other people’s designs to fail at, and a free week is exactly the kind of thing that refills a community around a six-year-old game. The campaign is a fine puzzle box. The editor is the reason to stay.
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