On October 8th, 2026, Team17 announced that the third game in the Escapists franchise was in development and slated for a 2027 release on PC and consoles. The trailer confirmed the game would likely follow the same flow as the other games in the series, with the core gameplay being centered around the player’s escape from increasingly difficult prisons. The trailer seemed to also indicate the studio is expanding the multiplayer functionality in the new game and making it more of a core mechanic.
The first game in the series, called Escapists, was developed by Mouldy Toof Studios under the guidance of Chris Davis, and published under Team17 on February 13th of 2015. The game had by far the simplest art in the entire franchise, as the studio was still getting its footing, but its novelty and charm quickly enraptured gamers, and the game became incredibly popular once it got covered by Let’s Players like DanTDM and Jacksepticeye.
The successor, and for a time the only sequel, Escapists 2, was once again created under Chris Davis, but this time was developed jointly by both Mouldy Toof and Team17 themselves, and eventually released on August 22nd of 2017. It ramped up its art quality while keeping the stylistic charm of the first game and quickly became even more popular than the first, largely due to how it successfully improved the existing mechanics in interesting ways, without deviating from the series’ main soul.
In the nine years since the release of Escapists 2, Mouldy Toof Studios has been purchased by Team17, and as of 2024, Chris Davis has left entirely to explore other creative ventures. Likely because of this new change in creative leadership, the studio felt it needed to make drastic changes to release another game in the series after so long, which leads us to the poor excuse for the character design we have today.
In previous games, the art was simplistic and 2-dimensional, with the characters not having mouths or noses, but its style fit the vibe of the gameplay well. That vibe, in my opinion, has not survived the move to the third dimension.
Escapists 3 has a much higher visual quality than the first two games, which I think works to the style’s detriment. Noses and mouths felt like natural features to omit from character sprites when each one was pixelated and low resolution, but with high-quality, 3-dimensional character models, the lack of them feels unsettling somehow. The characters’ eyes continue to take up a large portion of the models’ faces, much like the previous games, which I think also does not work for the 3D characters.
The characters may very well be the only real issue in art style. The limited map art we have seen, although not particularly creative or visually interesting, has no glaring issues that I can see. However, the model art of the characters, in addition to their own artistic issues, simply does not fit with the rest of the art. It gives off the impression that the character models were developed separately for an entirely different game, and then hastily thrown into this one at the last minute.
Contrary to some fans of the series’ recent opinions, I don’t think the move to 3D is a bad idea. Both the first and second games were 2D, and having the third be as well could likely end up being very repetitive. Also, depending on how the game ends up being developed, there are several potentially interesting mechanics that could be added that wouldn’t work as well (if at all) if implemented in a 2D game. I will still be buying the game when it comes out, but if Team17 wants the game to do as well as it can, they need to take a leaf from Paramount Pictures’ book and redo the art while they have the chance.
