The rest of the day is filled with three square meals eaten while guards beat down recalcitrant inmates between the tables, mandatory exercise time, work time for those who have secured cushy jobs as trash haulers or other mundane tasks, and generous amounts of free time. Upon wake up, we are all expected to meet for morning roll call, an event made even less palatable than you would imagine due to the collection of demeaning insults thrown our way from the team of guards. to get to the other side of town for work before the roads get clogged, seems overly luxurious to me. The day starts at 7:30 a.m., which after a decade of getting up at 4:15 a.m. Still, the name of the game is escape, so I have to try.īefore we get to that, though, allow me to walk you through a typical day in prison, or at least this cleansed version of it. There’s something to be said for a consistent and predictable routine-I don’t have to decide what to wear, when to eat, how long to stay up in the evening, or any of a plethora of the decisions we are faced with on a daily basis. The depth to which I have become at least partially institutionalized is actually a minor concern of mine these days. I hurry to add that my failure to escape after hours and hours of working at it does not mean that I am not enjoying the game. Even having eventually figured that out, I still failed the tutorial on the last step when I broke my shovel. Sadly, that ignominious failure shines supreme as the closest I have gotten to breaking out. The desk in my cell, for example, is opened with a very brief tap of the E key, but a longer press is for actually picking up and moving the desk. I hadn’t noted (nor, to be fair, was I told) that the E key performs two functions, depending on how long you hold it down. My problem with the TE2 tutorial turned out to be exactly that: my problem. “How,” I asked myself, “could I fail at the tutorial ? ” Clearly I had forgotten the three times I died during my introduction to Insurgency, but that’s a story for another time. Sure, I started out with the tutorial, which I struggled with. I missed out on the original The Escapists, but I didn’t think that would hamper my progress too much when it came to trying my hand at the newer version, what with my decades of interest in real world examples.
Yes, the "2" indicates that it’s a sequel. One would think that a background like that would make me a perfect candidate for a prison escape game called The Escapists 2. I’ve also seen or read my share of prison escape stories. Tunnels, disguises, single escapes, group escapes-I read them all. One of my favorite subjects was WWII POW escapes.
I used to read a lot of nonfiction as a teen.