Short review: Without Escape

Remember those typical 90’s point and click games? Without Escape, from Bumpy Trail Games and Eastasiasoft, it is a decent tribute with fine-looking still backgrounds and a few cutscene videos that bring you back to the good old days. I have to admit that I really miss point & click games, we have Artifex Mundi that released quite a few throughout the years and occasionally a few from other developers but very rarely. So I was really excited to get my hands on Without Escape!

That excitement quickly vanishes after you realize that nothing really exciting happens, most of the puzzles, to my utter frustration are just examining objects in all the different rooms. Forcing you to backtrack and search every inch of the rooms multiple times, you click on something in the office and something random opens up in the kitchen. You just don’t know it is in the kitchen, so as you can imagine you have to run around the entire house twice, the normal version and the other dimension version to continue your progress. Without Escape has two fun puzzles, that even requires you to take out pen and paper (or your smartphone) but I hoped for more, a lot more! After a short hour, I managed to finish the game and I was left with a “is this it?” feeling. Visually the game is very well detailed, with some neat gore scenes. The audio helps with giving you a creepy feeling that something is always going to happen, the game doesn’t have the typical jumpscare moments but it does get really positively scary. Despite some good stuff, I find it hard to recommend Without Escape. Point & click fans will have a good short time with it but a default gamer won’t really bother to even finish this.

Without Escape’s gameplay isn’t what I was hoping for, I don’t mind looking around backgrounds but this game is really pushing it. Some of the puzzles are really fun and requires some out of the box thinking, it is just a shame that it doesn’t feature more of them. While the game looks and sounds good I was left a little disappointed, especially because the game doesn’t have a lot of content.