#The escapists review series

But Frank begins to plot an escape when he learns his 20-year-old daughter is a junkie whoвЂ™s just had an overdose.

The central figure is Frank (Brian Cox), an old Irish lag who seems resigned to spending the rest of his days behind bars.

Wyatt, who cut his teeth on short films and episodic TV, says he was inspired by a 19th century short story by Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which tells of a hanged man whose seemingly miraculous escape is reversed and explained by the hallucinations he experiences moments before death.ДЄt its (very large) heart, the screenplay by Wyatt and Daniel Hardy, another rookie, is a poignant tale of redemption. And the ending is a stunner, a masterstroke of creativity. While the characters are sharply drawn, weвЂ™re told little or nothing about the crimes they committed or about the lives they led on the outside. The film breaks with convention not just by starting with the escape by a ragtag bunch of prisoners from a barbaric, medieval-looking prison, then rewinding to the days that lead to the break-out. Losing your job in the laundry room because you got in a fight suddenly makes acquiring a guardвЂ™s uniform that much harder, while failing to hide your careful crafted tools during an inspection can see hours of work go down the drain.Marking a superbly accomplished debut by 36-year-old English writer-director Rupert Wyatt, The Escapist is a thrilling, highly inventive twist on the prison break genre. In fact, as open-ended as the game first seems you only really start to get somewhere when you realise how every single action, or inaction, has its own consequences. The most basic of these involves simply beating someone else up, but even if youвЂ™re successful this immediately sends waves through the prisonвЂ™s complex social structure вЂ“ ensuring that your next choice of favour has to been chosen with considerably more care. But if you do turn up then you not only gain a chance to improve your role-playing character stats (by working out in the exercise room, for example, which is vital for being strong enough to move heavy furniture) but chat to other characters and pick up sub quests from them. The daily routine is more important than it first seems though, because if youвЂ™re missed or spotted where you shouldnвЂ™t be then youвЂ™re instantly in trouble. As the tutorial advises, your initial goal is to get together the tools you need to escape, as you assemble MacGuyver-esque alternatives to a screwdriver and shovel via a (slightly too obscure) crafting system.

#The escapists review series

The best way to start (the game features a series of prisons, each more security conscious than the last) is to simply go along with your set routine, learn where everything is, and meet your fellow inmates and guards. The odd thing is that The Escapists actually seems relatively realistic in the way it works. But The Escapists is having none of that, and although there is a tutorial to give you some pointers (which we later learned was created by publisher Team 17) youвЂ™re left to work everything else out yourself. But that freedom came at a price: the games gave you virtually no clue as to what you had to do.Д¬learly thatвЂ™s not how things work nowadays, where most games canвЂ™t bear to let you walk two metres without telling you exactly where to go and what to do. There were goals of course, a pretty obvious one in the case of The Great Escape, but how you went about achieving them was left entirely up to you. Their worlds might have been small, but apart from purposeful obstacles they were entirely open to the player to explore and experiment with. If the term had existed back then games like Skool Daze wouldвЂ™ve been referred to as sandbox games.