This week my friend Jamie and I have played through A Way Out and I have to say I found it an excellent story driven game. Developed by Hazelight Studios in 2018, A Way Out was a somewhat unique experience for me in that it’s a pure co-operative game experience designed to be played with a friend over something like 7 or 8 hours. This is achieved by presenting both players with a split screen as shown below. I am no stranger to split screen gaming, but I don’t recall ever doing this with a PC. Strangely however I think split screen works quite well for this game and only served to enhance my experience. I got a lot out of seeing what my friend was doing and could see what I was doing from their perspective which was cool because the main characters (Vincent and Leo) usually interact with objects and situations differently.
Being pretty much completely story driven and linear there isn’t too much I can say without spoiling A Way Out. But I can say that both Jamie and I did not expect the story to pan out the way it did and I believe I can speak for both of us when I say the game is generally quite funny and made us laugh a lot. There are a bunch of minigames which were fun and it uses Unreal Engine 4 to make the graphics pretty good. At first I felt compelled to efficiently progress through the game but I later found that slowing down to take the time to explore some of the areas was more fun and a good way of savouring the overall experience. Having completely played through the game with Jamie I have added A Way Out to my list of completed games which I am relieved to see grow steadily in recent months.
The only downside for me is that this game is published by EA (Electronic Arts). Traditionally I haven’t enjoyed EA games so I tend to steer clear from anything they touch. On this occasion however the game is excellent and a credit to EA but in order to play it I was forced to use their game launcher. I suppose it’s not a big deal, I can uninstall the EA launcher if I want, but it feels wrong that I acquired a game through Steam which is in itself a game launcher only to then be required to use a different launcher to play it. Perhaps I am being grumpy.
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