Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue Review – Dangan-ripoff

Spike Chunsoft’s visual novel-hybrid masterpieces in the Danganronpa, the Zero Escape Trilogy, and The Somnium Files are some of my favorite games of all time. Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue marketed itself as a spiritual successor to the Zero Escape trilogy, also published by Aksys back in the day, and drew a lot of comparisons to Danganronpa by calling itself a death game. Eleven anime characters of diverse backgrounds kidnapped and trapped on an island together for six months and pitted against each other – it certainly seemed that this was aiming for the same audience as Spike Chunsoft’s games. I regret to inform you, dear reader, that Inescapable is one of the worst games I have ever had the displeasure of playing.

Unlike Danganronpa, Inescapable doesn’t feature a Monokuma equivalent to drive the plot forward. There are two sisters who serve as game masters, and they communicate with the group over smart phone, relaying the many, many rules of the “No Rules” game. They are both absolutely insufferable. They inform you that you’ve been kidnapped and are being broadcast live 24/7 as a reality show of sorts to paying viewers on the dark web, and if you survive for 6 months on the island then you’ll be given 100k Euro as a reward. If you create more drama, you’ll get supply drops. If you are boring, you get less. Every two weeks, there is a vote, and audience members get to rank how much they like each of the contestants. The lowest ranked receive a punishment every cycle and the highest two receive a reward. Simple enough. Except there is no death in Inescapable, no stakes, no worries of survival.

You’ll be playing as Harrison, a British 25-year-old bus driver with no personality to be found. He likes anime, movies, and gaming. However, the lack of personality is intentional, since Harrison is a satire of visual novel protagonists; it also is totally irrelevant. Over the course of Inescapable, you’ll come to realize that Harrison actually straight up sucks. While starting off kind, he becomes a raging misogynist, incel jerk the moment the women on the island don’t do exactly what he wants. When asked to consider their feelings, he seems mentally incapable of doing so. Everyone on the island points out that Harrison is awful, and he’s pretty much hated universally at the end. The game recognizing that its protagonist is human garbage does not make me feel better about the 13 hours of my life that were stolen away by Inescapable.

Unlike the visual novel-hybrids that Inescapable is so clearly trying to ape, there is no gameplay to speak of. The only interaction I had with the game world is your vote for the rankings at the end of each cycle, which may as well not matter because it is a single vote amongst the thousands of participants in the audience. I have no idea if my votes changed the rankings each cycle honestly, they seemed to not correspond in any way with my input. Outside of that, there is what I can only describe as the worst mini-game of all time in a fishing challenge at the docks. You need to tap A to a rhythm, but the music playing while fishing is an entirely different rhythm. There are mini-games inside the arcade as well, however, and you can play much better games such as knockoffs of Asteroids, Duck Hunt, and even a working version of Wordle to remind you how exhaustively bad Inescapable is.

Inescapable is also about as horny and sexually charged as a video game could possibly be without being considered hentai. The characters are constantly making extremely awkward advances at each other, not to mention my own character who I had no control over. Here’s a cool trick you can use to quickly find your way to the Human Resources department at your office – pick any of the hundreds of cringe-inducing lines that one of these horny anime people drop on each other without warning and toss it out. I honestly don’t know who Inescapable is for; it’s way too cringey in that anime way for a regular game but not explicit enough to be an adult game. Suffice it to say I was thoroughly uncomfortable with it all, not to mention the flaming hoops the writers daredevil-jumped through to get the women into bikinis as often as possible. One minute I’m being yelled at for sending boob emotes in the group chat, the next I’m on the ground helping Chica look for her lost panties. Inescapable is constantly objectifying its women while simultaneously bashing you, the player, for not being woke enough.

The younger characters, so basically everyone except Giovanni, mostly speak in Gen Z-talk that I frankly have had a hard time grasping. The “zoomer humor” is rampant in all dialogue and text conversations, and I’ve found almost all of it to be the worst writing I’ve ever endured. I cracked a smile perhaps five or six times over the duration of Inescapable, which, for a game with tens of thousands of lines of text, is not a good hit rate. I was hoping that the beginning was deceptively keeping the characters’ true personalities hidden, since they kept hinting at everyone having a lot of big secrets. When I finally found some of the other characters’ “deepest darkest secrets”, they were the most benign confessions that I’d probably tell my dentist. I’m tired of all these people, and I wish never to see or hear about them again. Even if I ranked them from favorite to least favorite, the ones at the top would be there only by my indifference.

After 13 hours of pressing the A button a lot and having what felt like no control over the horrible actions the protagonist took at the end, and the embarrassing redpill garbage he spewed, I was rewarded with an ending where Inescapable tried to “aha!” me by telling me the game was supposed to be bad the whole time. It was a high-minded critique of capitalism and self-worth in a world based on money, a world that requires you to step on corpses to reach true happiness. I felt like I had just finished watching Morbius and then an epilogue popped up trying to convince me I’d just watched The Matrix instead. I don’t appreciate Inescapable having the nerve to be proud of itself at the end, thinking itself clever. I did not enjoy any aspect of this game, and you telling me that you know the protagonist, the characters, the premise, the dialogue, and the writing in your own game is bad doesn’t make it better – it makes the game that much more insufferable.

To try and slide in something positive to say, the UI looked really good and was very intuitive (because it is ripped pretty much wholesale from Danganronpa) and I really enjoyed the music tracks featured in Inescapable. They are actually composed by Shinji Hosoe, creator of the excellent Zero Escape series soundtracks, so there’s no surprise there, but it is a real shame there are only five tracks in the entire game. It also ran well with no performance issues on my Steam Deck and no bugs.

Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue is the worst game I have played this year for a one major reason: it has no idea what it is trying to do. The writers have no consistency in themes, storytelling, or even basic dialogue interactions. I’m kind of impressed that they wrote this many lines, because it is tens of thousands, and almost all of them are so, so bad. I hated every one of the characters more and more as the game progressed, especially my own character, and having no agency over him as he became a misogynistic human dumpster fire was frustrating to say the least. Having full voice acting that ranges from catastrophically bad at worst to passable at best does not help in any way, and the game insisting at the end that it was so frustratingly bad on purpose the whole time was insulting. I do not recommend Inescapable to anyone under any circumstances.

Nirav reviewed Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue on PC with a review code