A gripping, story-rich prison escape RPG with pixel-art style and anthropomorphic animal characters. Just go in and play to feel it yourself

Great.

The core concept of the game is pretty simple: explore a prison and execute an escape within 21 days. While there is a time limit on your victory, the game is pretty lenient: time only passes when you actually perform an action, so you aren't punished if you have to backtrack or need some time to decide what you want to do. There's a lot of decision-making in each day: do you want to keep your head down and earn some money with prison jobs, build up relationships with other inmates, make a toothbrush shiv and stab that loser Diego?

The 46 fellow inmate NPCs add a lot of life to this game. They all have their own stories going on, which you can learn about by eavesdropping on their conversations or bonding with them. There's a good variety between them; some of the inmates are violent whackjobs, some had compelling reasons for the crimes they committed, and others are just kinda dumb. Each one also gives you a different bonus when you max out your relationship with them, which can add a bit of variety to each playthrough since you can't make friends with everyone.

My favorite feature, though, is that there are two different playable characters you can select which massively changes how the plot unfolds. As a panther, Bob has night vision, superior athletics, and combat training that Thomas the fox completely lacks at the start of the game. However, his mission has quite a few complications that limit his escape options and he's already joined a prison gang which prevents him from getting rewards from the other 2. Thomas the fox, meanwhile, starts relatively unsuited for prison life, but is able to do jobs for any of the 3 prison gangs and has some support from his ex-girlfriend Maggie who can mail over items and money to help you out. The best part is, the character you don't play as still shows up in the prison as an inmate, and you can see parts of their story unfold in the background.

The only real criticism I have is that once you've done a playthrough as both characters, the replayability is a bit awkward. A lot of the escape paths require you to do similar things, and the NPC schedules and events are the same from playthrough to playthrough. There is a lot of variability to the game, but a lot of it happens toward the end, so experiencing other endings if often best experienced by loading a few days earlier and just escaping through a different route you found. There's a NG+ mode, but it makes you so overpowered by retaining all of your skills that it mostly becomes busywork.

Overall, this was a great experience. I enjoyed the planning, character building, and exploration. There was enough challenge that finally finding an escape route felt triumphant, but it wasn't so strict that playing the game felt stressful.