I’ve never played The Escapists. In fact, I’ve never heard of The Escapists until The Escapists: The Walking Dead came out. I do know what The Walking Dead is though, having read all the comics through the latest issue, watched the television show since the beginning, and played both seasons of Telltale’s The Walking Dead adventure series. I’d consider myself a fan of The Walking Dead and that is exactly how I came to The Escapists: The Walking Dead.
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I sat down to play The Escapists: The Walking Dead. I knew it had a retro aesthetic and I knew it took place in familiar settings from the comic and show. The first level, which is actually just a tutorial, puts you in control of NES Rick as he wakes up to find the entire world has gone to hell. As Rick, I explored the hospital looking for a way out, which ends the level. Along the way the game introduced me to its combat and crafting systems. The combat is super simple. It’s not engaging in the least and I actively hated it through my time with the game. The crafting system on the other hand is somewhat intriguing.
As Rick, you can search areas and collect materials that can be combined to make other useful items. For example you’ll take a bar of soap and combine it with a pillow case and you have a super simple weapon to bludgeon the undead to death with. Other items you craft may be of different use, like a shovel or a pair of wire cutters, and depending upon the situation they’ll be varying degrees of useful.
The game is set up as individual levels that visit iconic locations from The Walking Dead, places like Herschel’s farm or the prison where the survivor’s set up shop. Each level has a primary objective to be completed and then side quests that can be undertaken. Interspersed between these quests are daily activities that must be performed, like attending meals or performing chores. It’s this pseudo-RPG element that make the game more than what it seems like on the surface of the first level. But all of it ties into the level completion score that gets posted to a scoreboard. Think of it as a pseudo-RPG, meets time management sim, meets crafting game, with an element of score chasing.
I found the setup of the game to be a little weird but I was playing it because I like The Walking Dead. It was kind of cool to walk around as 8-bit Rick and equip 8-bit Glenn with an 8-bit screwdriver and take him with me to go kill zombies. Well, it was cool, up until Glenn and I got overwhelmed and Glenn got eaten (I got sent to bed without supper). The game just wasn’t really clicking with me; it seemed very scattered in what it was trying to do. By the end, though, I think it was more a me problem.
On my second run through of the farm level , I thought it was funny that I found a way to clear the level in a day by arming all my survivors and then tricking the barn zombies into chasing me one by one, setting them up to be killed by my team of 8-bit zombie killers, and opening up a clear shot to the end of the level. I felt I had got one over on the game. I didn’t. Nearly every other player had also “outsmarted” the game. The game is designed to be broken and finding the way to break it is where most people are going to find their fun. Some people are going to love it and find exponential replay value in trying to figure out the fastest way to finish the level and maximize their score. That’s not what I want out of a Walking Dead game.
Yes, there was side quests to do to enhance each level’s playability and provide a more grounded experience. But the core goal is figuring out how to outsmart the game and get the highest score, even if this goes against the nature of how you would play a game called The Walking Dead. After realizing this, it stayed in the back of my head and sucked the fun out of the game for me. It’s not a bad game, and it is good at what it does. But what it does, just isn’t for me.
This review was written with material provided by the publisher on the Xbox One console. For more on our review process, please read here.
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