Without Escape

You don't hear a lot about it these days, but there was a time when Myst was a legitimate phenomenon. It was the game to get if you owned a CD drive on your computer and completely changed the way developers looked at the point and click adventure genre. But I was never that into it. To me, it always felt like a series of boring photographs with a bunch of nonsensical puzzles sprinkled in. The brand new game Without Escape wants to revive the nostalgia people have for Myst, all while trying to present a modern horror story that will get under your skin. The good news is that I found it a lot more enjoyable than the games that inspired it. Unfortunately, the boring still images and lame puzzles are here to remind me just why I had a problem with the genre to begin with.

Let me set the stage: Your parents are out of town and you've been left home alone. You wake up in the middle of the night to hear strange noises coming from downstairs, but you're not sure if it's an animal, burglar or something else entirely. This sends you on what should be a tense adventure to learn the truth, but because this game takes so long to get going, it's mostly just an exercise in tracking down misplaced items and being surprised by the reveals in the final few minutes.

If the name Without Escape sounds familiar, then it might be because the game was first released as an Xbox Live Indie Game on the Xbox 360. The game has seen a massive visual upgrade in the last six years, with every single room, cinema and item getting a fully HD makeover. The result is a significantly better looking and playing game, but most of the underlying issues remain.

This is the kind of point and click adventure game where you're stuck hunting for things to interact with in a series of still images. The graphics look good here and the locations are all appropriate enough, but there are only a handful of rooms to explore and not much to interact with. The good news is that everything moves quickly and the cursor changes when you swipe over something you can look at.

There are, at most, maybe two dozen items to pick up and use, and even that I feel is being generous. That in and of itself isn't a problem, but their placement certainly is. Let's take the keys as an example. Most of the rooms in this house appear to be locked at the start, so a good chuck of the early game is spent looking for the various keys. The problem is that instead of using deductive reasoning to find the keys, you'll stumble across them in the weirdest places. Like on the top of a bookshelf or in an oven.

Click For the Full Picture Archive

Look, I get that developers don't want to make it too easy on the player, but there comes a point where the item placement makes no sense. It also feels like a lot of busywork. One of the major puzzles involves tracking down two batteries for a television remote, and of course those batteries are located in completely different parts of the house. Another puzzle has you fiddling with the hot water heater and doing math to open your father's safe. And those are some of the more interesting puzzles.

For a game called Without Escape, there's very little incentive for our hero to escape. Beyond a few strange noises and a little blood running down a painting, there's almost no reason to leave the house. There's nothing after you and no scares, so I spent the first 75% of this game waiting for something to happen. The horror stuff eventually shows up and the various endings are certainly intriguing, but all that stuff feels rushed when compared to the drama of tracking down two loose batteries.

On one hand, I appreciate the work that went into remaking this game for computers. Without Escape looks and plays better than ever, and fans of the game will get a kick out of the brand new graphics. But as a horror-theme point and clicker, this game comes up short. The puzzles are lame, the item placement seems random and all the scary stuff is reserved for the final few moments. I liked it more than Myst, but that's not saying much.