Red Accent Studios – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

September 18, 2018

Salary Man Escape Means Business on Steam VR

Physics-based puzzle title Salary Man Escape has been letting players release the stress of the working day on the PlayStation VR for a while now, but publisher Oasis Games have now announced that more players will have a change to guide the poor, persecuted salary man to freedom with news of the title’s release on Steam for PC, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Salary Man Escape directs the player to help an employee of an oppressive and near colourless office environment escape to the outside world by carefully moving and manipulating increasingly complex Jenga-like block puzzles to provide the titular salary man with a route to the exit.

“We’re excited to be working with our partners at Red Accent Studios to bring ‘Salary Man Escape’ onto new platforms,” said Daniel Lin, Vice President of Marketing at Oasis Games. “We’ve included the VR releases on both PlayStation 4 and PC so players can choose the experience that they enjoy most. Those looking for an extra challenge on PC will find 18 updated levels before they can reach those shiny metal doors to freedom!”

Players can examine the puzzles from every angle in the VR versions in order to find the right application of weight, balance and force in order to tip the blocks into the correct configurations to solve the puzzle and free the salary man.

There are over eight hours of gameplay available over six chapters and 78 levels, including 18 levels which have been remastered for the Steam version.

VRFocus reviewed the PlayStation VR version of Salary Man Escape, awarding it high marks and saying: “Salary Man Escape has some flaws, but it offers plenty of gameplay time for the money, The controls take some adjusting to, but there’s definite satisfaction to be found from mastering it, particularly as you advance up into the later and more complex levels.”

Salary Man Escape is available on Steam for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, currently priced at £7.04 (GBP), a 15% launch discount on the usual price of £8.29. Further information can be found on the Steam Store page.

For future coverage on new and upcoming VR titles, keep checking back with VRFocus.

July 12, 2018

Review: Salary Man Escape

Does anyone fancy a really elaborate game of Jenga in order to escape from the drudgery of the office? Boiled down to its most basic elements, this is what you are getting with Salary Man Escape. Like many other modern virtual reality (VR) titles, it seeks to offer some tongue-in-cheek commentary on the world of work whilst simultaneously aiming for a fun and engaging puzzle experience.

Salary Man Escape can be operated with either the Dual Shock 4 or PlayStation Move controllers. The Dual Shock 4 seems to be a bit more comfortable for long-term play, but the PlayStation Move was a little more intuitive.

Gameplay acts an awful lot like Jenga. Levels are laid out as increasingly complex arrangements of blocks. The ones that can be interacted with are red, while all the others are white. Once the route between your Salary Man in his suit and fetching red tie is open, he dashes wildly for the open door.

You press a trigger button to grab a red block, then slide it around using either the PlayStation Move want to the thumb stick to get it to the right location. While the red bricks are the only ones that can be directly interacted with, the other blocks are subject to physics, and will fall and knock into each other, which can cause disaster if you move the wrong piece at the wrong time.

The blocks have a satisfying weight to them, and there is a definite satisfaction is correctly solving a puzzle, particularly in later levels where you can set up a pleasing Rube-Goldberg-esque mechanism and watch everything fall into place after a single nudge.

Unfortunately, this is also where one of the main problems comes in. If a brick you don’t directly control lands in the wrong place, even a tiny bit, it can upset the entire apple cart and lead to a catastrophic cascade that forces you to restart. Having to restart because you screwed up is one thing, but having to do so due to the physics gods hating you feels a little unfair.

The other issues involves the movement of the level. Instead of moving yourself around, you move the level itself, rotating it and bringing it closer in order to identify the best way to tackle the puzzle. Using the Dual Shock 4, this is done using the thumb stick, and the controls are inverted, with no apparent option to change this, which can lead to frustration.

The art style is start, mostly featuring flat white blocks with touches of red and black and muted backgrounds that deliberately invoke a particularly bleak cubical farm. Combined with the manipulation of the levels and the puzzle mechanics, it is quite strongly reminiscent of the PlayStation 3/PlayStation Portable puzzle title Echochrome in some ways.

The music is… odd. While it isn’t bad as such, the upbeat J-Pop-ish tunes feel oddly misplaced, and get get grating and repetitive, especially if you are stuck on a particular level. Worse still, some of them are earworms and will not leave your head. Perhaps something a little more ambient might have fit better.

Salary Man Escape has some flaws, but it offers plenty of gameplay time for the money, The controls take some adjusting to, but there’s definite satisfaction to be found from mastering it, particularly as you advance up into the later and more complex levels.

80%

Awesome

Verdict

June 27, 2018

Salary Man Escape Finds its way onto PlayStation VR

Prolific virtual reality (VR) publisher Oasis Games has announced the launch of its next title for PlayStation VR, a comedy puzzle experience called Salary Man Escape.

Salary Man - Screenshot

Originally revealed in March with a May launch date, Salary Man Escape is the brainchild of Red Accent Studios (RAS), focusing on the one thing everyone wants to free themselves from, the daily work grind.

Set in a surreal, noir-esque office environment, in this block puzzler the employee (you) is dwarfed by an endless sea of desks, monitors and keyboards that entrap them. To free themselves from this insanity players must move objects considering weight and structure to create a route to freedom. Helping them on this journey are “motivational” messages such as “It could be that your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others”, seeming like they’re there to mock rather than help.

“£We set out to create a physics-based VR game with the theme of escape,” said Michael Michael (aka MM), lead designer at Red Accent Games. “Initially the team began with futuristic, sci-fi concepts but ultimately the familiar setting of an office and where the mind goes of an employee who desperately wants the work day to end, complemented what we were trying to achieve with the gameplay in Salary Man Escape perfectly.”

Salary Man - Screenshot

If you’re a fan of physics-based puzzles then Salary Man Escape has plenty on offer, with 60 basic levels, and 18 PlayStation-exclusive hidden levels (unlocked by collecting hidden coins) across six chapters. Each chapter introduces a brand new puzzle mechanic to the mix, making puzzle progression increasingly more complex and difficult.

Salary Man Escape should provide around 8 hours of enjoyment for players with a cheerful, classic ’80s Japanese soundtrack to accompany them on the journey. For any further updates from Red Accent Studios, keep reading VRFocus.