Escape the Darkness Reviews

"Escape the Darkness" is yet another of several hundred, if not thousands of garbage low effort endless runners plaguing Steam. Like all endless/autorunners, you're moving and you can't stop. All you can do is avoid the obstacles coming at you in this incredibly shallow shovelware game, and in this case you can only jump. Truly, this is pure garbage. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. "Escape the Darkness" is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. This game features a number of suspicious, likely fake positive reviews. The reviews all appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, all are in Russian, and all have very similar wording and writing style. Immediately after this huge peak of reviews, reviews (and player counts) for the game dropped incredibly sharply. This is highly unusual given the very low quality of the game and poor player counts. The "Positive" review score on this game should be taken with a large grain of salt. This might have been done to deceive/mislead gamers into paying for a bad product.

When Witcher goes Dark Souls Mario. That's hardly an overstatement. This game has something like a spark, a feeling that arises mostly from indie games, where the creators have poured their soul into the creation. As a result we get a casual yet challenging adventure / runner game that feels like a solid represenative of the genre. Filled with references (hilarious ones) - this game has an eye-catching design and an aura of old NES classiscs. The price was good, the experience - positive... can't complain at all. I only wish i knew how to crack the magic of the triple jump xD

A simple game with a charming aesthetic. As far as the art style goes I find it very appealing and if you are a fan of the Witcher series the main character might be a throwback. The opening cinematic is voiced well and has an interesting story to tell. However the game is very difficult, and unfairly so, I would recommend playing it just for the sake of seeing how far you can get; I'd really like to see someone get to the end. The random spawns of enemies more often than not put you into a situation where you just die, topped with the characters sporadic jumping getting to 50 meters in this game is an achievement. Pray to RNGesus and see where you end up.