The very concept of escape when it comes to zombies has become, from an entertainment perspective, next to impossible. They’ve saturated media and spread their virus across the public consciousness, and like the shambling hordes themselves, their appearances just keep coming. The outbreak of their pop-cultural contagion is a grim allegory to how things would probably go down if flesh-eaters suddenly invaded more than just our minds and wallets.
Dead Escape, then, is just another in the zombie ranks, with its only real differentiation being that it looks pretty nice for an iOS game. Interestingly, it’s not a combat game; in fact it only carries a “9+” rating on the App Store. Instead, it takes the familiar third-person horror genre perspective and combines it ever so slightly with a point-and-click adventure approach. This doesn’t always work, however. There’s little fear when the game refers to a zombie as an "obstacle" that you have to "get rid of," which may involve simply finding an alternate escape route. And the zombies all inexplicably just stand there; a probable cost-cutting measure in the game's design that makes Dead Escape one of the least thrilling infection scenarios we’ve seen to date.
I have to give the developer some credit, though. Dead Escape looks on par with notable top-tier App Store releases, and the puzzling mechanics work well, lacking some of the horror genre's classic, illogical solutions (looking at you, Resident Evil). You can still expect a fair amount of other horror tropes, though. The voice acting and narrative are atrocious; the protagonist actually starts the game with an aloud-stream of conscious dialogue to himself, which goes from a lamenting soliloquy over the quality of his local convenience store to his personal laundry and hygiene habits.
It’s all pretty silly, which would be fine if it weren’t for one terrible flaw: the game crashed numerous times while I was playing it. And annoyingly, there doesn’t appear to be any auto-save feature. I appreciate a good point-and-click offering, even one with as pedestrian trappings as Dead Escape, so long as it has an actual element of exploration (just ignore the whole logic problem of combat) and decent puzzle solving. But until some of the issues are patched, it's probably not worth playing.
The bottom line. Dead Escape has a dumb premise and some issues with logic and enemy interactions, but it's not all bad. Sadly, frequent crashes keep the better elements from shining through.
of 5
iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 3.1.3 or later
Good puzzles. Has a decent sense of exploration. Sharp visuals.
Logic issues created by non-traditional zombie encounters are weird. Awful voice acting. Game is prone to crashes and there’s no apparent auto-save.
