No Escape (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
334A playthrough of Sony Imagesoft's 1994 license-based action-adventure game for the Super Nintendo, No Escape.
This video shows two separate playthroughs of the game, one for each ending. The second begins at 45:51.
Based on the 1994 critical and commercial film flop starring Ray Liotta, Lance Henrikson, and Ernie Hudson, No Escape places you in the role of Robbins (Liotta), a marine who has been convicted and sentenced to life on a remote island inhabited by cannibals.
I can't say as I've ever seen the movie. I had never even heard of it until I stumbled upon this game ten years after it was released, but if the game is anything to go by, I doubt I missed much.
No Escape is a non-linear action platformer that revolves around simple inventory-based puzzles. You can play most of the stages in any order you like, and you can trade for items you need at the shanty town on the southern edge of the island.
The action, largely consisting of punching bad guys and hitting switches as you search for key items, has been patterned off of the likes of "cinematic" platformers like Prince of Persia, Out of this World, and Flashback. You can roll around, climb ledges, squat walk - all the standard moves are here. You can also create a variety of weapons from the materials you find as you explore.
The game's concept is a really good one, and it's clear that the developers were being ambitious with its design. Unfortunately, they lacked the chops to pull it off.
It was created by Bits, the studio responsible for such landmark titles as Last Action Hero (https://youtu.be/Nu7kDasuWto) and Wolverine: Adamantium Rage (https://youtu.be/kfFOsmpu3YU ). Quality was clearly never their priority, and yet, No Escape shows signs of some real effort having been invested.
Unfortunately, that doesn't prevent the game from being a total mess. The level design has no sense of flow to it and areas feel haphazardly put together, enemies take way to many hits to go down, and the environmental "puzzles" feel tacked on and totally unnecessary. Crafted weapons are useless given how limited ammo is, and since you can't access the menu during the boss fights, running out of ammo before the fight ends means you're stuck. The crafting and inventory interfaces are also needlessly confusing and difficult to use.
But the real problem comes with the controls. They're laggy and unresponsive, and the animation is choppy enough to make precise movement a total chore. The collision detection is often erratic and unreliable, and you'll constantly take damage thanks to the short range of your punches and kicks. It is odd, then, that No Escape is a fairly easy game - it's as if the developers understood how shoddy the mechanics were and tried to compensate by making Robbins virtually indestructible.
No Escape isn't nearly as terrible as Wolverine or Last Action Hero - sometimes it seems to try, that intro is pretty cool, and there is some fun to be found here - but the half-baked game design and the kludgy controls still make for a game that's not really worth your time or effort. At least I didn't think so.
It's not surprising that the game is so unknown. There's no reason to care that it exists. Given their output, one has to wonder if Bits aspired to become the Micronics of the 16-bit generation.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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