There’s a lot of humour in the interactions and snippets of dialogue that go on around you as you carefully scope out the prison and devise a plan to escape, but each NPC character in each prison is interchangeable – little more than a resource to be utilised in the prison escape if you so choose to. There’s very little character on display in The Escapists 2. To use Prison Break as an example again, what made that show so compelling was the way that it brought numerous personalities together and how each of them used their own characteristics to contribute to the overall escape effort. From there, the prison break itself becomes a thrilling puzzle of the mind and exploration of the personality. “We are captives of our own identities living in prisons of our own creation,” – this quote from Prison Break summarises the way prisoners are portrayed in most prison. Instead, the fantasies that we conjure around prisons make the prison experience a reflection on the person.
You’ll notice that very few prison break stories deal with the ramifications of what comes next when prisoners (who are not wrongfully accused) go on the run. At the end of the day, however, were you to ask people a simple question in isolation “would you rather there be prisons, or no prisons?” most people would accept the need for incarceration.īut in the realm of fantasy, and the process of turning the prison into an exotic location that we aren’t familiar with, there’s no need to consider what prisoners in the real world are really like, or how they interact with the rest of society. Certainly it’s not a failproof system, with people being mistreated in there, others being wrongly sent to prison in the first place, and the close relationship between the prison system and various cultural strains of racism that run through our (western) societies. The point of a prison is to put distance between us and those people who society cannot trust not to harm it. In the real would, of course, we don’t want prisoners to escape.
Often escape is the core theme of the story. A game that lets us indulge that fantasy – when there aren’t that many of them – was always going to appeal to a large number of people.
A prison is something that we all hope we’ll never actually experience by ourselves, and yet and the same time it has become a topic of fantasy, with a nearly endless series of films, TV shows, books and stories crafted about them. The original Escapists was nothing short of a runaway success (over four million units sold, apparently), and with good reason. Related reading: Harvard’s review of The Escapists 2 on PlayStation 4
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