Exit

Precarious Platform

That, frankly, is Mr ESC's long-term appeal - the fact that it's got wonderfully designed, fiendishly brain-twisting and honest-to-god satisfying puzzles by the bucketload. There's a nice difficulty curve through the first 100 levels (ten of which are technically tutorial levels), with new concepts (dangers like fire or electricity, tools like the pickaxe and the torch) being introduced every few levels. After that, there are another 100-odd levels to play, with the difficulty level ratcheted up significantly - a significant challenge for any puzzle fanatic.

The presentation, however, starts well but proceeds to trip over its own shoelaces and land face-first in a fresh, unscooped mess of dog faeces. The art deco style of the two-tone characters and the lovely 2D backdrops make a great first impression, and really hook you into the game from the outset. However, the whole thing is let down by singularly awful music and sound effects.

The music is forgivable, of course. It may be crap, but plugging your iPod into the Xbox 360 and replacing it with your own (presumably amazing) taste in tunes isn't rocket science. The sound effects, however, go some way to making the game outright irritating. Each companion seemingly has two voice samples, and by god they're determined to etch them into your brain like a searing hot brand. Until you find them, they shout inane "is anyone there?" phrases every few seconds; once you do find them, they tell you several times a minute that they're hungry, tired, or unable to speak because you've just torn their maddening tongues from their mouths and thrown them across the level.

Mr ESC himself isn't much better. He's got a selection of humorous things to say, you see, but unfortunately he's only got about five of them - ranging from side-splitters like "I'm getting too old for this!" through to comedy gold about being worn out from climbing all these stairs (which he normally seems to complain about when you're nowhere near a staircase). His limited repertoire is one thing, but his insistence on looping through it about once a minute is enough to make you want to strangle kittens.

Several other flaws mar the basic puzzling joy of the game. The AI of your companions, for instance, leaves much to be desired. They seem desperately confused by stairs and ladders, and to move them up or down a floor you'll often need to laboriously shepherd them to the top of the stairs, then to the bottom of the stairs, and then to where you want them to go - three steps where a few lines of path-finding code would have allowed just one.

Their path-finding is also perfectly happy to walk them straight into fires or electrified floors, which is somewhat ridiculous. Clicking on a location that's one flight of stairs away, only to discover that the AI has for no reason decided to walk to the other side of the level and right into a blazing fire, is outright upsetting. You'll be restarting levels a lot, as it's the kind of puzzle game where you often only realise you're doing the wrong thing when your mistakes are irreversible. We don't mind restarting the level to correct our own stupidity - but doing so to correct the stupidity of some idiot companion who has decided to go for an extreme fake tan treatment is annoying.

While we're criticising the game's flaws - bearing in mind, through all this, that these are mere furrows on the brow of contentment as we lean back and contemplate how many of our plans have come together - it would be lax not to mention its dalliances with platform game mechanics.

Obviously, Exit is controlled like a platform game - you walk around, jump, climb, and so on. However, that's no reason for a puzzle game to suddenly start demanding accurate jumps and careful timing from you - especially given that Mr ESC's movement controls would charitably be describe as clunky, and uncharitably described as similar to attempting to steer a drunken, one-legged tramp through the Krypton Factor assault course.