Oct 202023
Without Escape is a short point-and-click adventure game in which you wake up during the night after hearing a noise and decide to investigate.
Although you don’t find the source of the noise, you soon learn that something strange is going on.
This is a point-and-click adventure game with static backgrounds. You’ll visit each screen and click things to interact with them. Sometimes you’ll find items, which you’ll then use automatically when you click the right spot.
Some of the puzzles are logical, while others operate on game logic or surreal dream logic, so it sometimes devolves into revisiting locations and clicking everything until you find the right thing. Fortunately, it’s a fairly small setting, so that isn’t as tedious as it would be in a larger game.
(One puzzle also requires you to know a specific chemical symbol, and I didn’t see anything in the game that would provide that knowledge.)
The story… is an excuse to find keys and open doors and enjoy a creepy atmosphere. It’s clear the developers love Silent Hill, as there’s a lot of references to it, but the story is less coherent and just left me scratching my head at the end. There are multiple endings, of which I got the two main ones – the remaining endings appear to involve things like getting a game over in a specific situation and reaching a certain point in the game within a time limit.
Without Escape is a decent game, some mildly spooky fun that takes under an hour to complete. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s the sort of game where I’d be interested in seeing what the developers come up with next if they expand and polish the ideas found here.
You say “surreal dream logic” and my mind immediately turns to a can of lightbulbs. If they’re fans of Silent Hill, then tell me that was referenced, at least!
Hahaha, there was no “can of lightbulbs” reference as far as I noticed, but one part – I think it was when I opened the oven and found a key – made me think about it.
Mmm it can be tough with puzzles that rely on “common” knowledge that it assumes a player would know that might not actually be common knowledge, but then games can sometimes be a little too on point with clues like someone commenting on that exact periodic table element randomly and it being used to jog your memory, which I guess is one way to handle those kinds of puzzles even if it’s a little ham-fisted.
I feel like the best solution would be to have a periodic table somewhere in the game for the player to look at.
From what I saw online, the element it expects you to know is randomized in each playthrough, so that would be the best way to handle it.
Playing something like this, I would always be anxious about a jump scare every time I attempt to click on something, but this sounds like a fun little time!
It didn’t have a lot of jump scares, so that shouldn’t be a problem.