READER’S NOTE: The language in Inescapable is intended for Mature audiences only. Please be aware that the screenshots in this review accurately reflect the content within the game and may be offensive to some readers, specifically for language and sexual content.
The Danganronpa formula has been one that’s been successful for a while now. Stuff like Squid Game, Buried Stars, and many other titles have given us spin after spin on the same basic idea. You’re trapped and forced to perform in front of an online audience. Some games such as 999 and Danganronpa pull it off in a way that’s both fun and disturbing. Others like Charade Maniacs (review here) manage to make the concept so diluted that it loses its impact and as a result loses the audience even though the game itself is solid.
Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue from Aksys Games and developer Dreamloop Games falls into this latter category. The premise is simple…11 people have been kidnapped and taken to a deserted island to live 6 months with no rules of any kind. You play Harrison, a young British bus driver who ends up as one of the unlucky eleven. Your job is to survive 6 months on this island and if you’re still alive at the end, you get $500,000 (and yes, that’s not a lot of money considering the circumstances). The entire island is lousy with cameras too which means that it’s important to be careful what you say and do.
As you might expect, each person is from a different culture and background and they all have secrets as well (yourself included). Throughout the game, the producers are broadcasting everything you do on the dark web and viewers also vote on who they like and don’t. This puts you in a tight spot because you’re at the mercy of crazed directors who claim to have a nuke on the island and if you don’t perform well enough, things may go horribly wrong. This sounds like a recipe for a vicious no holds barred approach to the death and popularity formula, doesn’t it? Alas, you’d be wrong.
You see, the vast majority of Inescapable has you choosing who to talk to and talking with them. Sure they swear a lot (an almost comically ridiculous amount) but all they do is talk. A lot. For days. And weeks. And months. As Harrison, you’ll choose who to talk to in the morning, afternoon, and evening with the occasional interlude from the directors. Players have secrets you can unveil, there are minigames for fishing and a version of Wordle, and you can even play some decent arcade games (not good, but decent). For the most part however, you’re just talking to the other ten contestants as they constantly allude to violence, sex, and even cult membership over and over at breakfast, lunch, and dinner time.
With three choices per day most days, the game progresses fairly slowly and characters have a lot to say. Whether they’re Goths, workout fiends, misogynists, trans, scientists, rich elitists, social media stars or various other things, each contestant has a complex web of interests, things that they’re comfortable and uncomfortable with, and hidden agendas that you’re supposed to discover. It’s honestly a lot like one of those irritating reality shows where people are locked in a house together and arguing and backstabbing each other constantly. There’s a fair amount of overt sexual innuendo too and Harrison is surprisingly pervy. In short, a standard reality show with some theoretical risk.
Things progress glacially slow in Inescapable though. Days slowly tick by and you get to know a few contestants bit by bit. It genuinely seems like your choices matter at first too, with repeated visits to certain characters giving a more detailed static image of that character here and there while they talk. It’s clear that the game intends you to pick a girl to woo as well, but there are precious few actual choices that allow you to do so and after a month or so, it feels like nothing is really happening on the island other than childish drama. For an island prison with no rules, it sure seems like a country club. In fact, most people just hang out, play games, get drunk and flirt with no narrative tension at all. Sure a few don’t get along but it doesn’t matter. The game makes it fairly clear that Mia is the main love interest but she’s surprisingly irritating and unlikeable about half the time, as is almost every other character.
That’s kind of how a huge portion of Inescapable plays out. A bunch of vague threats to the health and safety of the contestants, some minor contests that consist of you talking to people and moving the story along, and nothing much happening. Harrison often just doesn’t bother to get out of bed and goes back to sleep until afternoon and evening and even the day counter seemingly randomly skips days because there is just nothing going on. Every time something interesting pops up like an abandoned facility or a threat of a storm and a rush to build a shelter, it ends up fizzling at the end with no real climax. The contestants are trapped for six months on the island and after 3 months, nothing has happened. No one has died. No one has factionalized. It’s just incessant banter that will have you begging for the nuke to go off.
Sure there are some laviscious cut scenes that give you a hint of the potential of what the island has to offer but even when the directors threaten the contestants, the penalty for being last in the first couple of two week sessions is so slight that it’s practically yawn-inducing. Unless you are playing constantly and burning through hours or the game or skipping whole sections of dialogue, chances are high that you’re just not going to care about the characters. The protagonist in particular is surprisingly unlikeable. Harrison is weak-willed and insecure, shy, awkward and lazy and he genuinely is wrapped up so heavily in his own non-existent problems that he doesn’t see things right in front of him. Normally as a player, you want to step into the main character’s shoes but in Harrison’s case, by the first month or so you’re actively rooting for someone to just kill him so you don’t have to listen to his angst anymore.
Most of the major characters are similar too. Inescapable has some of the most unlikeable characters of any game of its type. They initially come off as interesting archetypes that are a bit trite but underneath each is a veneer of pond scum that makes you not care about what happens to any of them. Just as you start to actively dislike most of the characters you initially didn’t mind, there’s a ratings system put in place and you have to decide who you loathe least. Of course, your decisions don’t seem to affect the outcomes, but it’s still ridiculous. Kudos to you if you’ve made it that far.
There are multiple game paths in Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue, but there’s no path system indicating which choices have a significant impact on the direction of the game and some directions are clearly unpleasant in terms of gameplay satisfaction. Feeling powerless to control your own character or the paths the game is taking has a noticeable impact on the gameplay itself and distances players from the game. The design choices here seem to actively hinder players in a way that makes you uninterested in completing the game and by the time things start moving at all in the last quarter of the game, it’s hard to care. If it’s not abundantly clear by now, Inescapable is basically a reality show VN with some light choice elements and minigames keeping it from being a kinetic visual novel.
It’s weird the approach the devs took with Inescapable because it looks like a high-quality AA game. The interface is decent (even though there’s no touch interface for Switch) and the GUI is simple and effective in most cases. The character portraits are expressive and show a nice variety of characters and the art style is excellent. The backgrounds certainly become more than a bit repetitive though and the character standees that are featured in most interaction points certainly look silly though they are clearly swiped wholesale from Danganronpa. It is odd that there’s a mouse style pointer on those screens though when all you have to do is click on a character and there are no other reasons to click anywhere else other than the minigame triggers. Why not just have the cursor highlight clickable things? All in all the style leaves something to be desired unless you’re a teenager with a high tolerance for pointless T&A even though the design quality is top notch.
Audio is similar to video here and the tracks are excellent but there’s not enough variety in them when you’re playing through hours and hours of endless tedious dialogue that doesn’t accomplish anything and the tracks loop repeatedly. Individual tracks are great but there isn’t much point in the exciting music ramping up for letdown after letdown as the story fails to take flight repeatedly. The same goes for sound effects which are limited and scarcely used. That’s a shame because some additional sound effects might have added more depth to some of the events. That wouldn’t make things better in terms of script but at least there would be a bit more interest.
Inescapable has a lot of potential but unless you’re an incredibly patient player, it’s such a long-winded game that most players simply won’t care to finish it and get to that last bit where things really get exciting. It’s almost more fun to play the Word Master minigame than it is to play Inescapable, but even that doesn’t last. This is a competent title that provides a fair number of interface options, looks good, and has an interesting hook but the gameplay itself is so stale and lifeless that by the time there’s any payoff, you’ll likely have moved on already and with the $50 price point, that’s likely a turn off for most players. If you’re looking for a new, thrilling social deduction game where the stakes are high and the tension is palpable, Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue certainly isn’t it, but if you’re still intrigued, there’s a decent story hiding in there somewhere. You’ll just have to take the long road to find it.
This review is based on a digital copy of Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue is also available on PS4/5, Xbox, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.
