I love death games like Danganronpa and Zero Escape. Blending visual novel gameplay with puzzles and whodunit mysteries is an exciting combination, and they’re often titles that you can pour hours and hours into, especially if you want to see all the available endings. Now there’s a new death game to look forward to — 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue.
Inescapable follows 11 people who are kidnapped and taken to an abandoned island resort where, if they can survive for six months without rules, they’ll each get €500,000. If they’re still alive, that is. Living up to its title of ‘no rules’, the game throws the rulebook out the window when it comes to the genre and offers a unique experience in that there doesn&rsq🦹uo;t actually have to be any murder involved.
“The intriguing thing is that a lot of people think this is just a death game,” Dreamloop Games co-founder Steve Stewart tells me. “What people will now find out is that it’s not just a death game, it's actually a reflection of your choices. So it can be a death game, but it can also be more akin to something like Love Island. We just said that there are no rules on the island. We didn't say you had to kill anybody.”
Stewart explains that your choices will set you on different paths, and each one can be an entirely different TV show-like experience, so maybe it’ll be more Squid Game than Love Island. “Across these different paths, there will be changes to the gameplay, you'll be on a different show, essentially. You can be in that death game, you can be in that highly competitive one, or there could also be some romance options in one path.”
Though there are different endings, the team explain that they wanted the focus to be less on the many paths and more on the decisions that put you on those paths to begin with. Sometimes, you won’t see the consequences of a choice until days or weeks later, and only then can you reflect on what you did and how it steered the story 𝓀in a certain direction.
Stewart emphasises that it’s not ju🦩st a case of having multiple endings, as the differences go beyond just an end scene and instead affect two-thirds of the game. Depending on their choices, two players can experience vastly different stories and events. The characters will be the same, but what’s happening won&r൲squo;t be.
Dreamloop Games CEO and co-founder Joni Lappalainen explains, “How I envision players will experience this game is that the first playthrough you get is the story that we think you should be told based🔥 on how you make decisions. To get the rest of the story and how the game could have gone, you need to be someone else than yourself. You need to make decisions that you wouldn&rs🔴quo;t [usually] make.”
Your choices as protagonist Harrison will reflect a different side of their personality based on what yꦏou have done or chosen to say. “We’re actually looking quite deeply into how people are interacting with the gꦜame to decide what it is that they’re really looking for. We’ve done some clever things there. I’m excited to see how people will experience it.”
Stewart tells🧜 me that telling such a humongous story, one that spans many stories within, makes him a little nervous when it comes to the idea of reviewers giving the game the time it needs to understand what is there, saying, “When we made this, we were l🌳ike ‘Let’s make the best thing’, not make the shortest, most consumable thing. Let’s make the best thing.”
It’s difficult not to draw comparisons between Inescapable and Danganronpa, not only in terms of gameplay but in style too, right down to the bright pink blood, “While we do take a lot of inspiration from Danganronpa, Zero Escape, and similar titles, mostly from Spike Chunsoft, we still want to do something cꦑompletely different,” Lappalainen says. “With that comes a game that will have the most meaningful player decisions or most player decisions in the whole genre.”
“Danganronpa is about three days in a school, these specific murders,” Stewart adds. “[Inescapable] is more about the characters over the course of six months and how six months and these crazy circumstances can actually change you. It's much more character-driven. Danganronpa has cool, zany, intriguing characters, but I think we take that to a much higher level of importance.”
While Inescapable draws on Danganronpa for ൲inspiration, it also adds its own quirky style. The characters are shown as board game pieces, so when they are murdered, they appear toppled over. Lappalainen tells me that though this was an artistic choice first and foremost, it also represents how the characters are a🤡ll just pawns in a game show.
Similarly, the team looked at stereotypes regarding character design in the hopes to put a fresh spꦉin on things, with Stewart explaining, “These kind of tropes or archetypes, they allow you to do shorthand. They allow you to convey a lot. But they also allow you to subvert that and say, ‘Okay, so you might get the gist. But do you understand the depth?’ There are a lot of expectations to subvert this. You can use a trope or a stereotype to set up that kind of interesting subversion of the world. Not everything is what you expect, is the idea.”
Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue launches on October 19 for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 🌼4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. There’s currently if you want to check it out.