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Premium Spotlight: Escape

by Eric March on January 3, 2009 at 9:40 pm

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(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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App Name:	Escape
Developer:	Nuclear Nova Software	Version:	1.0
Publisher:	Nuclear Nova Software	Size:	4 MB
Category:	Logic & Puzzle Games	Price:	$2.99/$4.99

Around the middle of last October I reviewed the lite version of Nuclear Nova’s GL Golf. Those of you who remember may recall that I wasn’t entirely too pleased with it, as among other things, it looked like an early 1.0 release of Jack Nicklaus Golf for its plain, rather ugly textures. I never applied the term “retro” to it because that would have done retro classics a disservice: There are certain old concepts that shouldn’t be revisited because they just don’t stand the test of time, and flat-shaded, low-resolution, ugly texture mapping in 3D is one of them.

Take those same ugly textures and apply them to a strictly 2D game though and everything changes. You go from ugly 3D to retro classic 2D. Now it’s old school limited graphics on a deliberate scale, intended to simulate the good ol’ days where you only had a small handful of colours to work with and limited resolution.

Nuclear Nova’s Jake Leveto hasn’t exactly had the sort of experience with old school programming some of us old fogies has; he originally wrote Escape for Mac OS 9 and OS X back in 2001. It was originally programmed in Metal BASIC though, so that’s kinda-sorta like old school programming. Now he’s gone and ported it to the iPhone in all of its retro glory, retaining all of the look and feel of the original, and the simplistic graphics that made GL Golf a dog give Escape its distinct 8-bit classic flavour that any retro afficionado can appreciate. At least, in-game, but I’ll get to that.

In Escape, you play a dude who’s trapped in a long series of labyrinthine levels and you need to make it through each one to gain your freedom. Each level contains obstacles, enemies, locks and keys, switches and triggers, disappearing bridges and movable blocks, and other elements to impede your progress, and you must navigate each one to figure out the solution to move on to the next.

As with any good game of this nature, the game starts off simple and gradually adds new elements for you to get the hang of. The first level introduces you to disappearing bridges, which can only be stepped on once, and ladders, which provide access to raised or lowered sections of the level. Level 2 brings in switches, which trigger something — in this case, a laser which destroys a block impeding your progress. There are is also a detonator here which destroys blocks barring the entrance, and gates which shut off what appear to be alternate avenues of escape. On level 3 you are introduced to bombs which can be used to destroy certain types of blocks, and toggles which usually raise and lower walls. Bombs can be placed arbitrarily by moving in the direction you want to place it and tapping the bomb button.

Further levels introduce movable blocks, some of which can only be moved once; patrolling enemies that zap you if you fall in their line of site; switches that must be activated by bombs; teleporters; any-colour keys and colour-changing keys that must be picked up when they’re the colour you need, and more. Once the game has introduced you to the main elements, it starts getting more difficult — which happens around level 8, which throws you some red herrings and is generally easier to complete than it looks. Level 9 is where the real fun and puzzle solving begins — that one takes some trial and error coupled with some critical thinking to solve.

The gameplay itself is pretty simply presented. The edges and corners of the screen act as your D-Pad; the left, right, top and bottom edges are your L/R/U/D buttons respectively, and you can move diagonally by touching the appropriate corner. This becomes important, as the game utilizes what I consider to be a bit of a cheat from days of yore: Moving diagonally through spaces that should, if there’s any level of realism to be considered, be completely blocked off to the user. (Think of a checkerboard of alternating walls and spaces; you can move through the diagonal spaces even though there are walls in all 4 cardinal directions.) Bombs are placed by pushing in the direction you want to plant it and hitting the bomb button — though when you move, the bomb button remains “pointing” at the last direction you moved for a moment, so you don’t need to multitouch if you don’t want to. (The bomb button changes it text based on the direction you’re travelling.) There are also buttons to retry the level or return to the main menu. Responsiveness is decent, though Jake sent me a development (debug) copy without optimizations, so responsiveness is a little slower than the version currently available in the App Store. It’s pretty subtle but makes a difference; the App Store version should be just fine, however.

Graphically, as I said, it’s very much retro-fab. My main complaint is that all of the tiles in the game are a bit too small, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell where your character starts; you have to move before you can tell. This is most evident on level 7 where you start off in the checkerboard section of walls at the bottom-center of the screen. Your chracter is actually partly off the screen so it’s impossible to see yourself until you move, and you need to move diagonally to get anywhere. Jake has mentioned to me that he’s working on a zoom feature for future versions, however. Additionally, the tiles aren’t quite the proportion that is needed for the screen; in some levels, as with the aforementioned level 7, the bottom is half covered by the status bar, so it can be a little annoying to navigate. This is another area where the zoom approach would be very handy. If the game was tackled from a Chip’s Challenge perspective and allowed you to zoom out to see the entire level, that would be ideal.

The main menu and about screen are probably the only obviously ugly parts of the game — ones that don’t look retro, just amateurish. The button layout is much like it was in GL Golf: Standard, default iPhone button and toggle switch styles, which look totally out of place. That said though there are a few useful options to the game. The main menu sports the ability to start any of the 60 levels (regardless of whether you completed the previous levels) and keeps track of the time it took you to complete each one. There are buttons to advance or rewind the level selection by increments of 1 or 10, which is handy if you’re looking to start on, say, level 30. The about screen also features toggles for music and sound effects.

The sound is decent enough — relatively plain but pretty good. The music is decent, too — sounds like 4 track MOD music, which itself is pretty retro, though not as retro as the game itself feels, so there’s a minor sense of anacrhonism here. It doesn’t spoil the overall retro feel though. The zoom feature would be handy here, and I think perhaps slowing down the movement just a wee bit would be good, too, so you don’t end up overshooting the space you’re aiming for.

Overall, I found myself digging this game more than I thought I would at first blush. Despite its few shortcomings, the actual gameplay and level design is well enough thought out that it keeps you thinking and trying to solve each level, there is a wide array of different puzzle elements to play with, and difficulty progression is well handled. You don’t have lives as such; if you fail at a level you can keep retrying it as often as you like, or even move on to the next level if you’re stumped — but I think that takes some of the fun out of it, personally.

Escape is currently on sale for $2.99, which I think is a pretty decent price for it. Its regular price is $4.99 — which I think may be pushing it a little bit — but there are 60 levels to play through, so there’s plenty of gameplay to be had here. As with any fixed solution puzzle game, replayability is at a minimum; you can re-challenge levels you’ve already completed to try for better times, but that’s the only real reason to play through it more than once. Still, for anyone who likes mazey puzzle games in a similar vein to Chip’s Challenge (though not quite as good as that classic — but what is?), this would be a good game to grab, especially at its current sale price.

Check out the video below, recorded on my brand spankin’ new HD camera. (I needed an excuse to use it for something practical.) Flash is required, and is embedded through YouTube. The video below is standard quality, so you’ll need to click here to watch in full HD glory. (Don’t forget to watch fullscreen!) The full array of screenies is available below the video links for those who can’t view the video. There’s no sound in the video; it was recorded in a noisy environment and I couldn’t be arsed to record and sync a direct feed. Please also ignore the crappy gameplay. It’s a little hard to play while reaching around a camera.