Don't Escape

By Scriptwelder

If there's one thing I've noticed combing through Flashpoint, it's that "escape the room" games were far and away the most common genre in the medium. If you enter pretty much any simple key word into Flashpoint's search, you can find an escape the room game about it. 'Clown', 'dog', 'zucchini', 'hobbit', whatever- Though that's mostly because there was whole companies dedicated to churning these puppies out as fast as possible for ad revenue. Can you imagine setting up a scheme like that and then waking up to hear that Adobe is discontinuing Flash entirely? Like, most of them seemed to have already started pivoting to the mobile market since that's where the money is right now, but still. Wild.

Anyways, the Don't Escape Trilogy is a clever little series that turns the concept on its head: Instead of escaping a room, you're trying your absolute hardest to lock yourself inside one. In the first one, you're playing as a werewolf during the day of a full moon, and you would really prefer not to go attack the nearby village and mangle innocent civilians for funsies. With no help and nothing but an abandoned cabin, it's up to you to try and scavenge supplies to trap yourself inside and prevent an otherwise inevitable wolfy murder spree. When you think you've properly prepared, you click a button to wait for dusk and see how your setup fared in keeping yourself from busting loose.

Being the first of the series, this is the simplest of the three Don't Escapes, but I find there's a real je nai sais quoi to the werewolf concept. There's not much of a story, but the atmosphere of role-playing as a monster who's trying to outwit your own feral instincts is very strong and special. You could make a whole other game with this same setup and have plenty of room to go way deeper into the idea, if you wanted to. And I'd play the heck out of that.

As another sidenote, you can buy all three Don't Escape games in one package on Steam for five bucks. They're all exactly the same as the versions that were online, but that would be your avenue to support the developer.