Base price: $18.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: 1 – 2 hours.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 1
Full disclosure: A review copy of EXIT: Prison Break was provided by KOSMOS.
I’m trying to be a bit responsible. New Zelda comes out soon and I know in my bones I’m going to blow off most of the weekend, writing-wise to focus on that and nothing else. I’m a simple man with simple needs and most of them are playing Zelda until my eyes hurt or something equivalent. It’s an easy dream. That means I need to bust out at least two more reviews this week so I have something to write about in the interim so that I can devote my entire next weekend to just Zelda time. I’m excited! But in the interest of getting to that point, let’s talk about EXIT: Prison Break!
In EXIT: Prison Break, players have been locked up! You probably did a crime, assuming you weren’t just locked up for no reason. That doesn’t happen! Except for all the documented times that it has. It’s probably 50-50 odds, at this point. Whoops. While you might be at a low point in terms of faith in the criminal justice system, you need to get out of jail! Unfortunately for you, they’re putting you in separate cells. Don’t they know you do your best work together? You’ll have to figure out how to reunite with your partner team if you have any hope of escaping. Will you be able to bust out of the slammer?
Overall: 9 / 10
Overall, EXIT: Prison Break was one of the more enjoyable EXIT games I’ve played! That’s saying a lot, since I normally hate prison-themed games. They tend to be a bit thematically gross and have occasionally played around in the police brutality / injustice inherent to the carceral system kind of town, and this EXIT largely sidesteps that for just “they be arresting anyone up in here”, which I … guess … is fine. Thematically fine; socially troubling. We can talk about that later. There’s a lot to like, here, but the particular thing that the Brands are showing off is their team-based mode, which I think is also a highlight. It means that the game plays even better remotely (as long as each team owns a copy), since you just can’t look at the other team’s stuff. I will give the mildest spoiler in that I will say that you don’t remain on separate and distinct teams forever, which is honestly good. That can generally get annoying unless you’re playing completely different escape games and then sharing answers. If you’re playing remotely, there are some visual puzzles that require the other team to be able to see you, so be prepared for that and have a camera or something set up.
The one puzzle that really got me required a fairly flat surface. When I’m playing these remotely, I’m playing on a couch with a tiny tray set up so that I can lazily solve puzzles. This game benefits much more from having a table handy that you can actually use, even if it doesn’t seem that way at first. You’ll get to it, I promise. The puzzles are still good, but you definitely shouldn’t play this on, say, a carpet or a couch or something, which is kind of a humorous restriction. Similarly restrictive is that if you’re a fan of playing the EXIT games solo, you do really need a partner for the first part of the game. Some of the puzzles are auditory or communication-based, so it’s less fun if you’re doing them solo, even if your partner is cheating a bit by reading a document she’s not supposed to have. She knows what she did. There are otherwise a good number of fun and charming puzzles in the game, so I was very pleased.
A particular highlight of the game is a timed puzzle that occurs towards the end of it. The element of timing adds a bit of a thrill and the puzzles that have to be completed in that timeframe aren’t inherently very easy, so there’s a good amount of pressure if you can’t get them done quickly. It’s exciting and feels like an actual physical escape room, so I was pretty impressed with those. They would have been my favorite puzzle save for a communication puzzle that happens when the teams are still split. It’s my favorite type of puzzle (reminiscent of my favorite challenge in Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, a game I’d highly recommend if you haven’t played it), so it tends to win out regularly. I’d call this a return to form, but the EXIT games have remained pretty consistent over the years, so it’s just more good stuff from our favorite at-home small-box escape room game duo. If you’re looking for a few hours and some fun puzzles, you enjoy the idea of a prison break, or you just want to have your own decoder disk that your coplayer isn’t allowed to touch, you’ll probably love EXIT: Prison Break! I certainly did.
If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!