The Set-Up
If you’ve not seen much of the promotion, A Way Out is a narrative prison escape game that can only be played co-operatively by two players. You can play online (the publishers threw in the surprising sweetener that only one of you needs to buy the game and invite the other to play), but it’s been designed for couch co-op, and that’s how it works best, as constant communication is needed to progress effectively.
My co-op partner for A Way Out was someone I game with several times a week, but other than a few puzzle platformers we’ve never really played co-op (usually, our gaming sessions take the form of one of us “driving” and the other keeping an eye out for shiny things/enemies/puzzle solutions and making the drinks).
We finished the game in four sessions of 2-3 hours at a time. (We were fortunate in having the whole Easter bank holiday weekend more or less free, so were able to play the game to completion without the usual guilt trips and distractions that plague adult gamers.) Getting the Platinum trophy took two additional sessions of about one hour each. Clearly, this is not the biggest title out there in terms of content; but now that we’ve reached an age where we’re more likely to cringe than cheer at the prospect of 100+ hours of gameplay (not that we don’t love the idea, we just don’t have the time), it’s a welcome relief to play a fun and interesting game that you can also have the satisfaction of completing in the equivalent of half a day.
The first thing the game asks you to do once you’re both signed in is to choose your character. Your options are Leo Caruso (a con-man and thief, hot-tempered but surprisingly soft-hearted) and Vincent Moretti (a white-collar money launderer falsely accused of murder, more rational than Leo but less experienced). After a brief discussion we decided that on our first play through we would play to type. My co-op partner is definitely the fiery one of us, while I’m just as definitely the shy one; as an added bonus, my partner’s experience with combat in games is greater than mine, while years of Telltale games and the like have made me better at social stealth. Therefore, assigning me to Vincent and him to Leo didn’t take long.
The Features
The story of A Way Out has drawn comparisons to The Shawshank Redemption, and the overall plot is a familiar one: two criminals in prison discover they have a common enemy on the outside, and vow to break out in order to get revenge. If that summary makes it sound generic, don’t worry: the translation of these movie tropes into a video game setting make this a unique experience, even if you feel like you’ve heard this story before. Similarly, if you’re expecting a Grand Theft Auto clone, think again: while it’s a game with violence at its core, you’re never let loose to commit gratuitous criminal acts, though there are several shooting-and-driving segments. Instead, you’re guided through a story that is centred around its characters, rather than playing as characters who enable the story. The fact that Vincent and Leo are both oddly sweet and ultimately very likeable helps, but it’s mainly that the creators have got the balance right: as a game it would be much harder to play if the story was less familiar, and as a story it would be much harder to follow if you were forever becoming distracted by challenging or repetitive gameplay elements.
It’s unusual for a story so steeped in Americana to cast two Swedish actors as the leads (though less odd once you realise that this game’s budget wasn’t the biggest in the world, and that one of the actors is the creator’s brother). But aside from a few moments where the pronunciation of a word or two went a bit wonky, the acting was fantastic - certainly enough that I ended up getting very attached to both characters.
The graphics are stunning: the game is built in Unreal Engine 4, which basically guarantees a beautiful game world. The makers of A Way Out take full advantage of this, particularly when your characters spend a few days hiding in the forest immediately after their escape. The environments in these chapters were so lovely that it made us wonder whether our characters really needed to avenge themselves against a common enemy; a new, simpler life in the woods sure did look appealing. The only real downside to the game’s visuals was that, despite the creators’ obvious attempts to differentiate them, it was quite easy to confuse Leo and Vincent, and not knowing which character you’re controlling at a key moment can be a bad thing for obvious reasons.
Gameplay is brilliantly interwoven into the story: the creator, Josef Fares, has gone on record saying that he never wanted the gamified elements to get in the way of the plot, and so you get a fantastically varied series of mechanics that serve the moment in the story where they appear, and thus are often unique to a chapter: a car chase when a quick getaway is needed, for example, or a side-scrolling fighting game when Leo comes up solo against a whole squad of cops. This could have led to a situation in which you’re forever out of your depth, struggling to learn a new set of rules every time. Fortunately, this isn’t the case, as the game is designed with subtle but useful anti-frustration features: auto-saves are frequent, for example, so if you mess up near the end of a long action sequence you’ll usually be sent back to a recent checkpoint rather than the very beginning.
The game has also gained a lot of attention for its many mini-games: little competitive tournaments between Leo and Vincent that include everything from basketball and baseball to Connect 4 and even an arcade machine. These provide welcome little breaks from a fast-paced narrative (both for the players and the characters), and they also add a few elements of almost endless replayability to what is otherwise primarily a once-and-done story-based game.
If the mini-games weren’t enough of a clue, A Way Out aims to include light-hearted moments despite its dramatic subject matter. There are a number of Easter Eggs referencing other games (most of which grant Trophies/Achievements, so are definitely worth looking out for), such as a cute shout-out to the developers’ previous game, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. The aforementioned switch to a side-scrolling fighting game style is clearly meant to evoke memories of Streets of Rage, etc. Despite its very cinematic style and linear narrative to match, A Way Out never forgets that it’s a video game, and delivers these little moments that nod to its place in the gaming canon.
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