We’re turning everything into Escape String’s language now that we’ve played it. Do you need to sit down? So, we need to travel left, left, left, and then up. Going to have a drink in the kitchen? Right, right, pause to allow my wife to pass, then right, right, take it up.
Escape String is a game about coding. We’ve played eerily similar games with our seven-year-old as she dabbles in programming and logic – frequently with an actual, physical robot moving in response to her directions.
It’s an ancient and straightforward premise. You are in command of a robot, but you are doing so remotely. In a sequence that runs across the bottom of the screen, you have space for fifteen commands, and those commands are highly constrained. You can move left and right, leap up and down, and crouch down. Getting to the exit on the right side of the level will require you to use these four inputs in the correct order to avoid all of the obstacles.
And there will be challenges. Every five levels or so, new ones are shuffled in, but you’ll have to deal with robots that fly at head height, mirror your actions, alternate between shin height and head-height, and even explode after a certain number of moves. Then there are crevasses and thwomp-style pistons, which all move in response to commands. If you don’t want to get compressed into the size of a floppy disc, timing is crucial.
There is some wiggle room. You are not required to complete a level within the fifteen available slots. This is where the title’s ‘String’ comes into play: you can enter a few commands to see where it takes you. Then add the second string of commands that may take you to the exit. Chunking up the stages in this manner will make them more approachable, but you will lose the higher scores.
At the end of each level, you are rewarded based on two things. You gain one collectable if you meet the lowest move total, and the other if you complete the problem in only one string.
You unlock the third prize by completing the level and earning an achievement.
You may have skim-read the review to learn about the achievement situation, and this is a source of them. After about a half-hour, you should have no trouble getting 1000G. That is after completing half of the game’s forty stages, although it won’t take long to exhaust it nonetheless. We completed all forty levels in an hour, with almost half of them needing to be replayed for perfect scores. The question is whether we will do so.
Because Escape String is acceptable, okay, and meh. Part of the problem stems from the two games described earlier: we’ve played better, more appealing, and more demanding games that do everything Escape String does in the last year. Escape String, in particular, is knocked into a cocked hat by Bright Paw: Definitive Edition. You could argue that Escape String’s £5.79 price tag is more appealing, but if you have the cash and want a coding-themed game, we’d wink and nudge you over to Bright Paw.
There are a few reasons why we prefer other games to Escape String. The importance of feedback to the player cannot be overstated.
When you don’t have a mental tape measure, it can be tough to determine how many steps are between you and a laser or death pit, especially in the early levels. All you can do is tap into the input and hope for the best. Four ‘rights’ gets you into the pit? You must submit three. Would it have been that bad to overlay a grid so the player could estimate how many commands would be required? Could there have been more information on the path of enemies?
This is compounded by the crouching crawl, which moves fewer squares than a stroll but more squares than a jump. That’s fantastic. What is the best combination of walks, crawls, and jumps to get me to the exit? The number of times we were one square short of the exit was aggravating.
And we couldn’t help but wish Flying Soldiers’ approach to failure had been more successful. If you enter the erroneous sequence in that game, the sequence is saved so you can alter it rather than start over. It’s a polite way of saying that remembering a sequence isn’t easy or entertaining. However, in Escape String, everything is wiped. To gain the greatest marks, we took out our iPhones and took screenshots of the code we entered so we could reproduce it – with slight variations.
All of these annoyances are entirely avoidable. 7 Raven Studios only needed to leap over them by pressing right, right, right. They do, however, completely dominate the proceedings. If failing didn’t destroy everything, guessing the number of moves and anticipating enemy movement would be more acceptable. However, the two together are a lethal combination. They collaborated on our happiness.
Because there is a decent game going on here. As with many coding-themed games, the moment when you muddle together a sequence of commands and then push ‘play’ just to discover that you lucked into a perfect solution feels fantastic. And that happens more frequently than you may expect.
Escape String also simplifies things. More orders, motions, and obstacles may have been attractive, but the penalty would have been complexity. Instead, Escape String wriggles around in the constricted confines it’s built for itself and manages to build forty passable levels. This strategy has no concerns about variation, but it does have some concerns about game length. An hour isn’t great value, and the urge to replay is questionable. We weren’t very motivated to replay a level because our orders had been overwritten and we’d have to learn them all over again. How detrimental a single simple decision may be.
We would recommend Escape String in one situation. If you have a younger coder who is tired of the simpler coding tools and wants to put their skills to the test in a somewhat more difficult environment, Escape String can help. It may only have four instructions to enter, but the levels squeeze every last drop of complexity out of that.
