Platform: PlayStation 4

Developer: Hazelight Studios

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Release Date: March 23rd, 2018

Genre: Action/Adventure

Reviewed by Nips

It’s been several years since the release of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, a fantastical game about two brothers searching for a magical cure to save their dying father. I had a pretty good time with Brothers, albeit with a few obvious flaws and a general lack of polish, but the most interesting thing about that game was that it utilized the rather unique concept of commanding two separate characters with a single controller in order to collaborate with yourself. Simply brilliant. This time, Hazelight Studios is here to offer yet another cooperative adventure game in an attempt to push the genre even further, only this time you get to cooperate with someone else in an escape-from-prison adventure!

A Way Out begins in prison. Leo, a convicted jewelry thief, is watching from the prison yard as the buses arrive to bring in the fresh batch of prisoners like lambs to the slaughter. In one of those buses is our other main character, Vincent, who has been found guilty of murder. As the hapless Vincent soon finds out, prison is not a friendly place. Luckily enough, Leo just happens to need a companion, pairing the two protagonists in an unlikely partnership as they try to escape from jail and dish out some revenge on the people that got them put there in the first place.

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So let’s get the first obvious thing out of the way. First and foremost, A Way Out is a cooperative adventure. This primary component is so important to the core gameplay and story that this is the only way you can play. That means no NPCs if you can’t find a friend to play with you, and no going it solo. But, if no one wants to come over to your house to play, you can still match up with someone online, reminding me of some of the best moments from Journey, where anonymous players would randomly be dumped into your game. On top of that, whether you’re playing locally or online, the display will always remain in splitscreen, allowing you to see what your partner is doing at all times, and vice versa. I can see this being a big point of contention for a lot of players (muh resolution), but I personally think it was a stroke of genius, resurrecting that “couch gaming” nostalgia while adding its own twist.

The reason I say this is because the developers don’t just plop you down into a splitscreen orientation and send you off on your own way; they instead continue to use the couch gaming format in ways that creatively experiment and toy with genre conventions. During many narrative-heavy segments in A Way Out, the frames around each character will bend, move about, and alter their shape depending on their importance. If Leo is having a tense conversation while Vincent is just messing around playing a game of darts, Leo’s side of the screen will slowly take over in a cinematic widescreen, not entirely pushing Vincent out of the picture but making it clear to both players that something important is happening. This goes for both characters, giving each player chances to feel more or less important during narrative-heavy segments.

And moments like these are where A Way Out hits its highest peaks. Playing alongside my brother, despite the fact that we were both looking at the same screen the whole time, I came out of the other side of this game feeling like I had an experience completely unique to me as I inhabited my character’s role in a way I didn’t even know was possible. Due to this, A Way Out has a great potential for replayability, since it’s extremely tempting to try it again as the other character and see how different your experience might be.

So I’ve had a lot of great things to say about A Way Out so far. I must be in love with this game, right? Well, not exactly. While it features a nice helping of unique ideas, A Way Out is not really a perfect game. One of my main grievances with the experience is the gameplay, itself, which can be good at times, but is often not very involved. There aren’t that many opportunities for open-ended gameplay, meaning that almost all of the segments have a specified action or series of actions that you must execute in order to progress, making the game feel a lot more like a quick-time event than anything else. This makes the game a lot more rote than it should be, not requiring any actual skill from the players. That said, there are some parts that are truly thrilling, such as the shooting and chase sequences, which convinces me that the developers were more concerned with creating an experience rather than a challenging game.

Gameplay isn’t A Way Out’s only problem, either; the voice acting is near horrendous. The first time I heard Leo’s voice (y’know, one of the main characters), I thought it was a cruel joke. Vincent, the other main character, is a little bit better, but he’s still not that great. The recording quality can sound a little weird at times, and the actors just don’t really seem like they’re ever in the moment. As I said, Leo is particularly egregious, and it actually turns out that he was voice acted by a Swedish-Lebanese man named Fares Fares (really?), so let’s just say that it doesn’t exactly sound right when he’s trying to do a northern American accent.

If you thought the roller coaster of mediocrity was over, then you were wrong! Not only does A Way Out sport sub-par gameplay and noticeably bad voice acting, but the story is pretty basic too. It’s your average story about two star-crossed male friends fighting against adversity, in this case in order to escape from prison, but there’s no real nuance to it. In fact, the story in A Way Out has the exact opposite of nuance; it clobbers you over the head with its themes and tired stereotypes to the point of being laughable. There were more than a few moments during this game where I had to roll my eyes at the sheer corniness, contrivance, and lack of imagination featured in this game. The story seriously feels like it was written by a middle schooler with no grasp of narrative complexity.

Nips, you might be saying, you have so many bad things to say about A Way Out. You must hate it, right? Well, that’s a really good question. And the answer is no. I don’t hate this game. In fact, many a time did I encounter moments of pure magic hidden behind the rough exterior of A Way Out. Oftentimes, this was despite the game, as I usually found it more enjoyable to “break” the experience and fail on purpose just to see what would happen. At other times, the game, itself managed to achieve moments of pure clarity and self-awareness, pausing just long enough to stop taking itself so seriously and let the player have a little fun.

There are so many goofy things to have fun with in A Way Out, with several sections acting as breaks from the main game where the developers put in a bunch of fun toys and mini games to play around with. I seriously had more fun exploring these spaces and beating my brother at horseshoes, baseball, and board games hidden throughout the game’s levels than I did completing the majority of the game’s linear story. I honestly wish there were more moments like these built into the game.

Reading this review, you might be thinking that A Way Out is all over the place. And, well, you’d be right; one of A Way Out’s biggest problems is that it doesn’t seem to know exactly what it’s going for. A prison escape story? A revenge story? A campy action movie? Frankly, it’s really hard to tell, because this game takes itself so seriously at times, while in others contributing to a strong feeling of ludonarrative dissonance–the things that you’re able to do and often want to do as a player don’t really seem to match up with the characters’ goals and motivations. You know something weird is going on when you as a player are more motivated to sit down and play a game of Connect Four than you are to search the hospital for your pregnant wife. But I found a kind of beauty in this. Despite itself, A Way Out is a game that lets the player have a little fun from time to time.

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Needless to say, A Way Out has been a very confusing experience for me. I love it, but I hate it; I shun it, then I embrace it. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have some fun with A Way Out, though it’s hard to escape the feeling that this was often in spite of the game’s design rather than because of it. To be fair, there are plenty of moments where A Way Out’s design coincides perfectly with the director’s vision, offering enjoyable and high-octane action movie sequences you can experience with a friend. Moments like these make me want to compare A Way Out to the Uncharted series, but with a much lower budget. And that’s not a bad thing, because Uncharted has yet to offer an experience quite like the one featured in A Way Out, and I think this resurrected genre of cooperative adventure shows a lot of promise. This isn’t a perfect game, but I had a lot of fun nonetheless.

Nerd Rating: 7.5 out of 10