Having played Escape String, we’re converting everything into its language. Need to get on the sofa? Well, we need to go left, left, left, up. Going to the kitchen for a drink? Right, right, stop to let my wife pass, right, right, pick it up.
Escape String is a coding game. We’ve played remarkably similar games with our seven-year old as she ventures into programming and learns about logic – often with an actual, physical robot moving with her commands. You may have played similar games, perhaps with board games like Robo Rally, or in the past year on Xbox, with Flying Soldiers and Bright Paw: Definitive Edition.
It’s a simple old premise. You are in control of a robot, but you are accessing them remotely. You have space for fifteen commands in a sequence that runs across the bottom of the screen, and those commands are extremely limited. You can move left, right, jump up or crouch down. Getting to the exit on the right-hand side of the level will involve these four inputs, ordered in such a way that you avoid all of the obstacles.
And there will be obstacles. New ones get shuffled in every five levels or so, but you will have to contend with robots that fly at head-height, who mirror your moves, who alternate between shin-height and head-height, and even robots that explode after a set number of moves. Then there are crevasses and thwomp-style pistons, all maneuvering with each command. Timing is everything, if you don’t want to be compacted into the size of a floppy disk.
A little bit of leeway is given. You don’t necessarily have to complete a level in the fifteen allocated slots. This is where the ‘String’ of the title comes into play: you can enter a few commands, just to see where it leaves you. Then add a second ‘string’ of commands, which might take you through to the exit. Chunking up the levels in this way will make them more manageable, but you can kiss goodbye to the better scores.
At the end of each level, you’re given rewards dependent on two factors. If you meet the lowest move total, you get one collectible, and if you do the puzzle in only one string, then you get the other. With both, you unlock the third reward, 100%-ing the level and gaining an achievement to boot.
You might have been skim-reading the review to find out the achievement situation, and yep, this is a font of them. You will get 1000G with no problem after roughly half-an-hour. That’s after half of the game’s forty levels are completed, but it won’t take too much longer to exhaust it regardless. We finished all forty levels in an hour, leaving about half of them to be replayed for perfect scores. Whether or not we will do so is another matter.
Because Escape String is fine, okay, meh. Part of our problem is the two games we mentioned earlier: we have played better, more inviting and more challenging games over the past year that do everything that Escape String does. Bright Paw: Definitive Edition, in particular, knocks Escape String into a cocked hat. You could argue that Escape String’s £5.79 is more affordable, but if you have the money and want a coding themed game, then we would wink and nudge you over to Bright Paw.
There’s a few reasons we’d recommend other games over Escape String. A biggie is feedback to the player. Especially in the opening levels, when you haven’t got your mental tape measure sorted, it can be incredibly difficult to know how many steps are between you and a laser or death pit. All you can do is tap in the input and hope. Wait, four ‘rights’ takes you into the pit? You need to submit three. Would it have been so bad to overlay a grid, so a player could judge how many commands it would take? And could there have been more feedback about the path of enemies?
This is exacerbated by the crouching crawl, which moves fewer squares than a walk, and a jump, which moves a greater number of squares. Well, great. What combination of walks, crawls and jumps will get me to the exit? Gah, the number of times we fell short of the exit by one, single square was infuriating.
And we couldn’t help but long for Flying Soldiers’ approach to failure. If you input the wrong sequence in that game, the sequence remains so that you can tweak it, rather than enter it all over again. It’s a courteous approach that acknowledges that remembering a sequence isn’t easy, nor fun. But in Escape String everything gets erased. To get the best scores we were whipping out our smartphones and taking a screengrab of the code we input, so we could duplicate it – with some minor changes.
These niggles are all so avoidable. 7 Raven Studios just had to press right, right, and jump over them. But they really do dominate proceedings. Guessing the number of moves, and anticipating the movement of enemies, would be more forgivable if failure didn’t erase everything. But the two in combination are a deadly duo. They tag-teamed our enjoyment.
Because there is a good game here. As with a lot of coding themed games, the moment where you fudge together a sequence of commands and then press ‘play’ only to find that you have lucked into a correct solution – well, that feels great. And it does happen, more often than you’d think.
Escape String also keeps things simple. It must have been tempting to crowbar in more commands, moves and obstructions, but the cost would have inevitably been complexity. Instead, Escape String wriggles about in the confined box that it’s created for itself, and manages to construct forty decent levels. There’s no concern about variety with this approach, but there is a slight concern about game-length. An hour isn’t fantastic value, and the compulsion to replay is iffy. We weren’t particularly pushed to play a level again, simply because our commands had been erased and we’d have to remember them all over again. How damaging that one simple decision becomes.
There is one case in which we’d recommend Escape String. If you have a younger coder who is growing tired of the simpler coding tools and wants to test themselves in a slightly more challenging crucible, then Escape String provides. It may only have four commands to enter, but the levels wring every last drop from that simplicity.
In virtually every other situation, we’d point you to other games: Bright Paw: Definitive Edition in particular. Because Escape String is missing some quality-of-life features that would make it a more satisfying coding game. What remains behind is too thorny, too drab and too short to really justify purchasing.Â
You can buy Escape String from the Xbox Store
