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Exit Exit is that rare thing: a PSP game that isn’t just a quick-fix port of a PS2 title. Better than that, it’s a completely new, original game world.
It’s also a game that’s been developed from the ground up for play on a handheld. The thing about the majority of PSP games is that the people creating that software seem not to have grasped that games which work well on a regular, under-the-telly console don’t work quite so well when they’re transposed to a portable.
At heart, Exit belongs to a long-forgotten genre – the puzzle platformer. Controlling the hero of the piece, a debonair escape artist and part-time art deco superhero named, obviously enough, Mr. Escape, the player has to navigate a number of two-dimensional buildings that have been affected by a range of natural disasters. The object is to save the inhabitants and accompany them to the eponymous exit.
Each level is a carefully constructed logic puzzle, each of the people needing rescuing being a key to solving it. While the player has direct control of Mr. Escape with the d-pad, the analogue nub can be used to issue orders to each of the individuals he meets in a level, with different people having different abilities and weaknesses. Children can slip through tiny gaps that adults can’t fit into, but need the help of an adult to mount or descend from high platforms. Portly adults can push heavy objects, but, again, require help with high platforms.
Also added into the mix are items – keys for doors, fire extinguishers, ropes – which also have to be taken into consideration – Mr. Escape can only carry one at a time, but any adults he finds can also hold one. The game begins to feel like a small-scale, more freeform take on Lemmings, or possibly Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. Levels require much thought, prior planning and understanding of the game’s tight set of rules, along with an element of trial end error. The variety of obstacles and tools has allowed the designers to keep coming up with new, memorable, cunning conundrums throughout.
It’s an attractive game. The PSP’s screen is at its best when displaying bright, sharp colours and Exit makes fantastic use of it with some vivid, Cartoon Network backgrounds. It even turns the screen’s one big failing – the horrific blurring whenever anything moves at speed – into a virtue. The thick black lines of the two-tone characters are given an inky fluidness thanks to these unintentional after-images.
Like Flashback and the original Prince of Persia, Exit’s characters feature motion captured animation that looks great and allows the artists to cement the 1930s stylings of the character designs. Mr. Escape’s suave, sophisticated looks are reinforced by the way that he moves – like an action serial hero. Women in ankle-length skirts lift themselves up onto platforms side-saddle, children descend ladders one step at a time.
However, the pretty animation comes at the cost of control. Mr. Escape has to finish the animation cycle that he’s currently in the middle of before he reacts to your next command. It’s a familiar problem, though in games like Flashback and PoP it was always apparent when the character would respond. That’s not the case here, and it can lead to some unfortunate and cheap deaths as you find that the running jump you thought would kick in at the right time to make it across that large gap has started too early or too late, sending you tumbling down the hole between platforms.
Sound, too, is problematic. The music doesn’t initially feel like it belongs in this game, seeming to sit at odds with the visuals, but you eventually become used to it. The main issue is Mr. Escape’s voice, which doesn’t suit the character particularly well. Worse, some soundbites are linked to the incorrect animations – dude, I get that you hate stairs, that you find them exhausting, but why do you feel the need to tell me that whenever you’re hoisting yourself up onto a box?
By far the most frustrating fault, however, is the lack of a retry option on the level results screen. Each attempt at a level is graded based on the time it took you to reach the end and the number of people you rescued, giving Exit both a score attack and a time attack element. This is spoiled somewhat by the strange omission of a ‘retry’ option from the mission results screen – annoyingly, if you failed to beat your previous best you have to wait for the level select screen to reload, then reload the mission itself before you can make another attempt. This sits at odds with the short levels and the developers’ intention to create an immediate, fuss-free experience.
Praise must be lavished on Exit’s generous unlocking structure, though. Once the first ten ‘training’ missions are cleared, you’re given the freedom to tackle the next seventy in whatever order you desire. It’s a smart, thoughtful bit of design that helps prevent the player from hitting a brick wall. But while this suits portable gaming by allowing the player to jump in and out at any point, it also robs the game of the obsessive hook of wanting to see what comes next. Exit is portable, then, but also disposable.
Ultimately, it just falls short of the mark. Structurally and visually it’s one of the PSP’s best, but flies in the ointment prevent it from becoming what it could have – a reason to own the hardware. PSP developers need to get out from the rut – to see that the device can be more than a miniaturised PS2. Perhaps it was too much to hope that a hero called Mr. Escape could have performed this wake-up call. It would have been nice to be able to round off this review with something that poetic, but reality isn’t that quite that neat. At best, Exit indicates the way forwards.
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