Fire Escape

[h1]Experienced on the Oculus Rift. Spoiler Free Review.[/h1] You can watch my review here: https://youtu.be/iZr5nyI8fxA This is a 1 hour long, mostly cinematic experience running on the Unity Engine. You're basically a voyeur on the fire escape of the adjacent building where you observe the drama unfold in front of you. You can zoom in with your smart phone to pay close attention to the action in a particular apartment window open for viewing. The interactions are of the point and click variety. You select which apartment you want to snoop on and then at times you can also select which reaction you want to convey to the question being asked of you through the use of emojis. There's a whole cast of suspicious characters, but you can't snoop on everybody at the same time. So there is replayability to see which important scenes you missed play out to get a more thorough view of the story. You can easily go back to the menu to play out the scenes again for the particular time frame o...

Real ASMR AND a Murder Mystery story??! ...Hell Ya!! The game 'seems' short here. But the point IS to have us replay it a few times over and again! Contrary to a Netflix or TV series, where what you saw is what you saw and then have to rely on your friends to maybe learn about a different angle or new perspective to the intrigue. Here you control the camera. And exactly because you can't see all the action all at once, you have to re-watch it from a different angle each time to fully get all that's going-on out there (and gain Achievements in the process)! In my opinion, this is brilliant and makes it a much more immersive experience than just watching TV! Therefore, if in doubts due to the many mixed reviews, don't run for the closest 'Fire Escape'. And instead, choose to enjoy all the action of this dramatic night, from your vantage point of view at the top of a building filled with weirdos. What could go wrong? ....Right?!! ;)

Interesting idea for game play- you view into different apartment windows to try and decipher a who done it murder mystery. But the execution was way to passive. You play no role in the story other than as an observer, and the reveal isnt based on any action from your side. This felt like a demo for a game play function more than a true stand alone game.

A good whos done it murder mystery game in VR or Non-VR. I played in VR using my Htc Vive, the game is played through 3 chapters which are time stamped so if you miss any thing you can go back to, i did 1 play through of all the chapters i enjoyed it very much the graphics, in which i mean the charater models are nothing to shout about but not to bad, the story line is good, the voice actors are amazing, so all in all i would recommend this game, there is a bug which paused the game not a lot but its annoying, so i hope they patch that but its not game breaking as you can just unpause, i do wish you could rewind the action, maybe that could be added, so my score is 7/10 if the bug is fixed 8/10.

Really on the fence about this one. On the one hand, its an interesting take on story telling. On the other, there's really not much to do in this 'game'. The game's major gimmick is that you can choose who's apartment's to focus on, and thus you're not going to get all of the story at once. You can go back at checkpoints to get the other apartments stories. At the very start of the game, and through many later parts, you are forced to list to the 'whisper girl'. It is extremely annoying, and I almost closed the game and refunded about 10 minutes in. It really has no point, and seems to be there for 'weird for the sake of weird'. The story itself is ok. Kind of a cliche setup for the murder that you can tell what's going to happen in the first few minutes. The graphics are ok but not great. The voice acting is great. As I said, on the fence. As far as thumbs up or down, the whisper girl is going to be the straw that turns my thumb down.

Unfortunately have to leave a negative review. The game just refuses to respond to my controllers, despite multiple reboots, restarts, tweaks, and other things, and the dev has not responded to me about the issue. It loads up OK but no controls so can't play it at all, which is a shame because I think I would enjoy it a lot. Note I also tried to use KB+M but it wouldn't respond to those either, at least not in VR (which sort of makes sense). I have no interest in playing it without the VR headset though, nor having to unplug it to launch the game in not-VR.

Fire Escape is basically divided into 3 "episodes" that are further segmented into parts of a couple of minutes each. As such, the whole thing takes about an hour to play out, give or take. There is no actual gameplay element to this, and you just watch and listen as the events unfold. I was expeting to take part in solving an interactive mystery, but this is not that. Add to that a slew of unlikable characters [i](If I had to sit through one more forced, unskippable "conversation" with that annoying, whispering sh**bird....)[/i] and yeah, it's not even enjoyable to watch. The voice acting is mostly good ([i]except for the aformentioned whispering "asmr"-idiot[/i]) and the "game" runs well enough. My hardware specs are in my profile for reference, but Fire Escape is so undemanding that it's hardly even relevant.

Perhaps get this game on sale if you really must. It's not a well written story. The gimmick of the game is being a voyeur, who is watching people as they live in their apartments across his alley. How he is hearing these people, I have no idea. Unfortunately, this isn't much more thrilling than an old ViewMaster. All you do is watch, with very little action being taken by you. A few phone calls. The game presents elements and then abandons them to the ether, to push forward a story that is rushing towards a non-ending. You are presented with possible supernatural elements that end up being... I cannot remember what that ended up being. You are presented with ASMR Sweetie (ASMR Darling of YouTube) having some bizarre "Into it" aspect of your character's voyeurism, but not elaboration. You even have a murder mystery that basically amounts to nothing. That is this game's greatest flaw. Everything you see amounts to nothing. You're either going to see the very obvious "twist" that t...

Immersive storytelling experience. Played in VR (Index) and enjoyed the narrative, great voice acting too.

I really liked this game and I thought it had a few strong points. Primarily, the voice actors and the motives for the characters were well thought out and added a layer of depth to the game which many AAA games lack. The concept of the game, the different windows and selectively learning information, was something that I had never seen before. My one improvement would be to add a function that (when not in VR) allows you to put the phone down when you are on a phone call. Past that I had a great experience!