When it comes to game titles, The Escapists: The Walking Dead is one that lets you know pretty much everything you need to know about the game. It’s The Escapists, a prison escape game, combined with the world of the popular comic book and TV series, The Walking Dead.
The Escapists has been one of the success stories of Team17’s foray into game publishing, with Mouldy Toof’s prison escape game receiving a lot of help from their decades of experience to deliver a game that captured the imagination of more than half a million gamers. It’s a success deserving of a follow up, with Team17 developing this standalone game in-house for Xbox One and PC – though a PS4 release down the line would not be surprising – and in hunting for more sources of inspiration, The Walking Dead’s story arc set in Meriwether County Correctional Facility sprang to mind.
Of course, there’s no prison guards watching out for every little misstep or a strict prison routine for you to defy, but you will have regular activities throughout the day to look after. The most obvious will be clearing out zombies that might have managed to break through the defences or that have been locked into a different part of the prison, but you’ll also have to go scavenging the local area for supplies and keep morale high as you head to the scenario’s climactic moments.
Compared to the DLC prison themed after The A-Team, this isn’t just a single map, but a full standalone release with five scenarios to play through. Naturally, you take control of Rick Grimes as he wakes up from his coma in the hospital, encountering the zombies for the first time, as the game takes you through a brief, narrative led tutorial. You’ll combine a sock and a bar of soap to create an impromptu weapon capable of taking down a walker, as well as eventually acquiring a gun.
Gunplay is a brand new aspect to The Escapists, with some light twin-stick shooter action the basis. Of course, it doesn’t suddenly transform the game into an action-packed shoot ’em up, and with only a limited number of bullets to play with, you’ll have to choose when to break your gun out carefully. Not to mention that the noise of a gun firing will attract nearby walkers and bring them right to you.
There’s obviously a greater focus on narrative in this game, compared to the rather basic objectives of the original. To aid in letting the story unfold, panels from the comic book have been recreated in the game’s distinctively simplistic pixel art style. Of course, that’s still going to be a sticking point for many people, but for the rest of us, it’s a good way of integrating the story with the game’s visual style.
With years of stories in the comic books to choose from – the game follows these and not the TV show’s story – Team17 have been able to pick and choose the stories that they feel work best with the gameplay, with a little advice from the comic’s creators. As you can imagine, the gameplay best suits those moments where the survivors try to settle down in one location, and attempting to stave off the inevitable catastrophe and relocation for as long as they possibly can.
Hershel’s farm is one such story that makes a lot of sense, with Grimes and the small group of survivors staying in this one place for a long period of time. Naturally, nothing lasts forever in this world, and so while you help out on the farm, clear any stray walkers that come by and keep morale high in the group, you also have to be trying to gear up and collect weapons for them all [SPOILERS] in order to tackle the eminent danger which lies waiting within the barn.
While it’s about a million miles from Telltale Games’ popular adventure games within the universe, blending The Escapists with The Walking Dead is an idea that makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Certainly, there’s going to be a very different tone, but there’s also a surprising amount of common ground that makes the gameplay a good fit for the setting, along with a fresh twist on the usual proceedings.