Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue is a new visual novel social thriller game created by Dreamloop Games and published by Aksys Games. The game takes place on an island resort where eleven people have been kidnapped and forced to partake in a reality TV show with the promise of each contestant getting $500,000 if they make it to the end.

Players will take on the role of the character named Harrison a 23-year-old British dropout, the story starts as Harrison is on a bus just minding his own business and people-watching. As he watches a young girl and an older man get on the bus, everything fades to black, he then wakes up in a container with a puzzle lock on the exit. After escaping from the container, he finds himself in a jungle-like area and hears the voice of a girl nearby, thus entering Maria a 23-year-old German girl. Harrison says to himself that he remembers seeing her on the bus sitting a few seats behind him. They both stick together as they search their new surroundings and encounter the other nine kidnapped characters.

The game features many conversations and back-and-forth with the other island contestants, you can pick who you wish to visit when you are looking at the map of the island to see who is where. If there is more than one person at a location, it is treated as a group conversation, and you will hear a segment of the topic. You can choose to stay and play it out or just leave and move on. Now and then a mini-game will be thrown in to change the speed of things.

The first mini-game the group plays is trying to guess who did what as one of the characters. Eva has dug up gossip on everyone and shares the secret in a game like “Guess Who once streaked at a sporting event”, and if you are big into the real-life game “Wordle” you can partake in that also on the phone, and like real life each day there will be a new word to guess. 90% of the time you will just be having dialogue as you play where narrative choices are given that direct the outcome of certain events.

The overall graphics for the game are your basic visual novel style where it will be a still 2D image of the character displayed for who is talking. Before you engage in a conversation with them, they will be displayed as a gameboard piece to best describe it, with a coloured base and then a still-drawn image of the character attached to it. The background of the world will change reflecting the area that the conversations are happening in with generated images of a beach, forest areas, and poolside resort, there are a lot of colours throughout and use of many background settings. Each character is well designed from their look to attire, it reflects the character as you learn more about them, at times you will see outfit changes like when they are at the beach for swimwear which seems very odd, given they were kidnapped and yet have fitting outfits to change into.

The audio while having a constant presence of background music and audio jump scares, the vibe and theme of the music seem to blend well with what is happening in the story. At times it will shift from casual pop style when just lazing around the resort but can get dark and mellow when things get hectic as the story gets deeper. Each character has a voice to the extent that

when you interact with them, they will say a line or two of random dialogue, but the voices suit the design of the character. Eva for example, is a party girl who gives off the vibe of being popular and all about gossip, so the voice used for her is that of the typical popular girl in movie and TV show settings “Like you know” type of vibes so while there is a voice to the characters you will still be reading the dialogue they have to offer.

In terms of gameplay and difficulty, it is very easy, just a point-and-click game. The puzzles that you run into are not overly hard, you are just there to watch the story unfold with the choices you make. So, there is replayability if you wish to do it all over again and make other choices to see the other outcomes.

In conclusion, Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue does bring a new thriller-style concept to the TV reality shows that people watch like “Big Brother” and “Love Island”, but instead of applying for it, you’re just dragged off and thrown into the show, forced to do it as an escape is impossible.

It can get boring with just constant dialogue reading; these styles of games are never my first choice to play unless they have mixed-up portions of gameplay to even out the experience, I felt this needed more mini-games and things to do other than just talking and choice-making.

Written by: Shane Walsh