Escape Plan

Escape Plan was among the first games to show what PlayStation Vita could really do once its design was built directly around the console's own controls. Two characters, the skinny Lil and the pudgy Laarg, try to escape a bizarre facility full of traps, blades, and dangerous machines. The player doesn't control them directly in the usual sense; instead, they guide them through touches, taps, drags, and the rear touch panel, which can, for example, bend the floor or push an obstacle out of the way.

Every room is a standalone puzzle with one correct solution and a whole range of very nasty ways to fail. The characters can be sped up with a tap, put to sleep, inflated, or sent into the gears, and the game openly plays with the idea that death is part of the experimentation. New mechanisms, combinations of both characters, and levels that require split-second timing keep getting added along the way. A rating for the number of touches and speed then encourages replaying already-solved rooms in search of a more elegant approach. There are several dozen levels split into chapters with their own settings, and the game manages to tell it all without a single word, just through movement, sound, and short scenes between rooms. Alongside the main campaign, additional sets of rooms were added that ramp up the difficulty and assume the player already has full command of all the mechanisms.

The visual design is what players remember most. The game is entirely black and white, drawn with bold outlines and clearly inspired by surrealist and silent film, joined by a soundtrack made of jazz pieces and jittery piano. On Vita's sharp display, this high-contrast style looks fantastic and still feels fresh today. Reviews praised its inventiveness, atmosphere, and use of the hardware, but criticized its brevity and the fact that part of the content was sold separately. Today Escape Plan remains one of the best demonstrations of what Vita's hardware could do the moment someone actually worked with it, rather than simply porting a game from another platform.