Escape from Pleasure Planet – PC Review – by BoxCatHero

Genre: Gay-Themed Sci-Fi Point-and-Click Adventure
Developer: Arc System Works
Publisher: Arc System Works
Release Date: Dec 14, 2016

From the same people who made My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant comes their next game in the series, Escape from Pleasure Planet. Much like its predecessor, it boasts a gay-themed cast. I know this will turn away some people because they are uninterested in this game, but I urge people to give it a chance. I applaud the devs for their choice in how they went about the game, it is easy to pander to those who hold hate for such things, but they took a road far less traveled. For that, my friends, hats off to you.

The game plays like any other point-and-click adventure game and is sure to be a niche classic. However, some of the puzzles don’t even make sense. What I mean by that is that there is little to no direction on some of them about how to go about solving them. I played a lot of point-and-click games in my time, and the puzzles on this one are confusing as hell. For example, where I got stuck for about an hour, you have to get three aliens to move out of your way, and the first two are relatively easy. The third one, however, takes using a coin to disrupt a tele-pad to remove him. The process of it just did not make sense to me.

The story for the game is something out of a cheesy space movie from the 60’s, which is not a bad thing because some of it was gloriously funny. In this game, Tycho is in hot pursuit of the wanted criminal Brutus who has escaped to the pleasure planet Arcadia. Through tracking him down you meet a host of new characters, and a returning character or two from the first game. Some are helpful, and others you just wanna punch in the face. Such a Mistress, the robotic eye that oversees Arcadia, I thoroughly hated her from the onset.

The graphics in the game are bright and colorful, which does help keep the mind focused on what you need to do. One of my favorites in this is the spaceship Brutus, used to get to Arcadia. Its design reminds of cars from the 50’s, if they were a spaceship. Its personality is absolutely adorable as well. To be honest, other then that, the graphics did not grab me at all. I think I’ve been spoiled to much by the higher quality games I’ve been enjoying as of late.

The audio leaves even more to be desired then the graphics. It was kind of jarring at times, and seemed out of place/mismatched at others. The sound effects were spot on, though, and other than that the audio was subpar. The game has a overall premise that I thoroughly liked, however, the shortcomings of the graphics and audio dramatically took away from it for me. I can say this though, when a bug is brought to the devs attention, they seem hop on it right away and try to fix it. That redeems the game a bit.

BoxCatHero gives Escape from Pleasure Planet a Drastik Measure of 4.0 (40).

Pros:

• Gay-themed cast (Road less traveled by most devs)
• Speedy bug fixing

Cons:

• Graphics subpar
• Audio can be jarring/mismatched
• Puzzles are poorly implemented

Escape from Pleasure Planet can be purchased on Steam for $14.99 USD.