Escape from Pleasure Planet

Bought this game many years ago, and still enjoy it to this day. Yes, it's very janky, so be warned, but I find the story and puzzles to be fun and made with a lot of heart!

If you're gay enough you don't need instructions. I wasn't gay enough.

"This is going to be a long game isn't it..."
Yass queen. It is.

There just aren't enough games like this! I enjoyed the sillyness. There are a couple of legitimate sci-fi themes, and some places are very creepy and surreal. A couple of puzzles were too vague for me to get on my own. I had the game hard-lock on me a few times, the loading was really slow, and the low apparent framerate was uncomfortable to watch at times. I still recommend it though for the quirky story and to signal to game devs that we need more gay-inclusive games.

It pains my heart to downvote a gay game from a gay developer but I just straight-up did not have a good time. It's really such a shame. The art style is charming and the music is fun but the puzzles are so obtuse sometimes I just got overwhelmingly frustrated. I even tried the walkthrough and there's a section of it that's broken and I got horrifically stuck there for a very long time. Unfortunately after dealing with that I got put in a possible game-over scenario and had to repeat the entire section. I ended up looking up a youtube playthrough instead because I wanted to make sure the ending wasn't going to be a downer like the last game and that's where I found the ultimate flaw to be. The ending is just as disheartening as the last game's, albeit less sudden and kinda stupid. From the very cover art of the game you're promised a quirky romantic piece with Brutus, who is a charming and sexy villain. The cover art really made me want to fall in love with the game, I was so excited to see the hijinks and romance with Brutus and the main guy. But in the end, there's no good ending. You don't redeem Brutus or save him. Your character basically just says, "screw you why would I ever want to date you?" and then leaves him incarcerated. It genuinely just left me feeling bad for Brutus. How incredibly disappointing is that? The game could have had a cute and silly romantic ending and instead it just rubs all the time you spent playing it in your face. It's not that I'm just mad about not getting to date Brutus, but it's that the game is FRAMED as such and that's what I was looking for. It even acts like that's the course it's going to take when you get to the wedding scene until it yanks it away at the very last moment. It honestly felt incredibly mean-spirited, and it felt like the way the dialogue was put the dev was pointedly saying that you the player were at fault for wanting to romance Brutus and that was a little insulting. Playing/Watching it immediately after My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant really makes me think the dev actually doesn't really like romance or happy endings. The game promises sexy, playful fun and never delivers on that. I'm not saying every gay game needs to descend into R18 straight-up sex but it was just so flat and really left the player out of the romantic loop it promised. The story certainly had some very creative elements to it but honestly at the end I'm just left feeling disappointed and a little depressed by it. It has some great elements, fun character design, great background art, simple controls, and great moments like the space oxygen-jet minigame, but if the story's not there it's just not enough to pull it back.

TLDR: The game is, as far as puzzle games go, extraordinarily difficult at times and only really intense lovers of point-and-click adventures will be able to wrap their heads around it. The art is great and the characters are fun but the story leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. Ultimately it lacks the fun and romance it promises, taking a very dull and vanilla way through itself, and ends on just such a loveless note and that takes the joy out of the game for me.

Played this game off and on since I bought it. I reached a point that requires you save the game, log out, then log back in. I have not been able to continue from this point. I have emailed with the developer many times, and this still is where I am stuck. I actually enjoyed the game to this point. The entire concept of logging off and on again is very annoying, and obviously flawed. I am sad that the game has such a significant glitch that even advancing is not possible.

All in all, the part I played was fun. But, I would not recommend this game until the section with IRIS is patched or fixed, since the game cannot go beyond that point.

This game is not for everyone. Definitely a LGBT theme and its a point-and-click story. True to the Luke Miller brand, this game is loaded with innuendos and campy fun. Artwork is excellent for the genre that doesn't disappoint.

My only constructive feedback is that you will need to use a guide to get through the middle of the game to the end. Some scenes don't explain what you need to do and I think it was intended for "discovery," but even that was too difficult. Major piece of advice is to save often.

Just a horribly convoluted and un-intuitive system. While I like the premise and the art of Joe Phillips, the game is severely lacking. The puzzles are frustrating and don't feel rewarding when you have solved them. If you can solve them. The music is annoying and loud. Attempting to change things in the settings results in me getting booted to desktop. The only real way I have found to have any non-frustrating time playing this is with the walk-through guide. If it is on sale (at least 50% off) it might be worth getting if you didn't mind a one play through and never play again kind of game. Otherwise, save your time and money and treat yourself to something/anything better.

On the asteroid scene, every time I try to use the jet when the asteroid shows up, the image changes and it says I'm going to the wrong direction. At first I thought I wasn't fast enough, but after trying dozens of time, it seems that the screen always change AFTER I press. EVERY TIME. I swear the game is trolling me.
I'm done, lost my patience with this game.

You do need the walkthrough for some parts if you're as lazy as I am. Other than that - good game, great story. Loved the little twist at the end...(well at least *I* didn't expect it).

Okay, so this is going to be a long one because there's something in here that I love. I have a long history with point-and-click adventure games, grew up with The Curse of Monkey Island, and I'm always looking for a game that holds up to that experience.

Graphics and Visuals:
The best thing about this game is the character designs. Not only are they full of life and personality, but the art style works really well for this game. The environments don't always match up to the style of the characters, which would be a huge plus if they were, but it's not jarring. I understand this is likely because the doing the environments in the same style as the characters would've been far more time-consuming.

I will say that the environments can feel very empty at times. I think back to games like Monkey Island and The Longest Journey and there were always more things to click on. Each zone had several things to investigate, many of which weren't necessarily important for puzzle-solving, but they helped the world feel alive. I would also say that there aren't quiet enough environments, but this will tie into gameplay more so I'll leave at that for this section.

I also want to talk about the lack of character animations. When you look at other successful point-and-click games with a 2D art style, you'll see all of them have more lively animations for every character. Check out the Deponia series or Curse of Monkey Island (Do I sound like a broken record yet?). It's scope, I know, but it would be a massive improvement to have character's mouths moving and have their animations change to showcase their emotions.

Lastly, let's talk about the UI, because while the style of the game otherwise is on point, the UI is probably the worst thing about this game. I'll be blunt: the choice of font, design of dialogue boxes, and the menu are all very hard to look at and make this game feel a lot cheaper. The UI could certainly be stylized, but what we have here isn't stylization, it's fourth-grade Microsoft Power Point assignments. I'm sorry, that's really harsh and I know it's not great to hear, but UI is a much bigger deal than many might think, and it's an easy-fix too. I think for future games, you should definitely do some research on other games to come up with a higher-quality UI, a better font choice, and stylized icons including for the mouse pointer. It would take such a small amount of time and would have a giant impact.

Audio:
I love this soundtrack and would call it a hidden gem. It fits the style and theme of this game really well and sounds great. There's a part of my brain that's telling me some of the soundtracks overlapped at pointed, but I might be remembering things strange.

There is something to be said about the lack of voice acting. Again, I know it's all about scope. Voice acting means you need recording equipment, hiring a voice cast, and more man hours to ensure all the voice clips go to the right places. For this genre, character and personality is really what helps sell your games. If you absolutely can't hire a voice cast for future games, you can add voice SFX at the very least. I'm talking about when characters speak in games like Stardew Valley or Undertale. There's no voice acting in Undertale, and yet the characters each have their own unique voices because the sound effects that play when they speak are so different. That's a much smaller scope idea that could make a big difference if voice acting simply can't be done. For this genre, though, I would put it somewhat high on the priority list in future titles.

Gameplay:
As a whole, the gameplay of Escape from Pleasure Planet is passable. It's not great, but it's not bad either, and there are high points and low points. There's a lot to unpack here though, so let's break it down.

First, I would say there aren't enough zones in this game. I mentioned this briefly in the visuals section, but many puzzles take place in 1 or 2 rooms. This feels very claustrophobic in most situations. I think something like the Deponia games would feel really good here. Those aren't quite as open as the Monkey Island games, but they're spacious enough to give you some room to breathe. While size is important, you could also be more creative with your environment space and fill it with more things to do. Be frugal here, but try to not be too stingy either.

This ties into puzzle-design. I would say that puzzles are often either way too simple or way to complicated. This game breaks puzzle segments into chunks, especially when you go into people's fantasies. Everything you'll need is in there and everything you get will be used before you leave. This is fine for the most part, but it has its downsides. It's too easy that every item you need you can pick up almost immediately. Often times in other point-and-click games, a lot of the tools you need are gated behind other objectives, like the cabana boy in Curse of Monkey Island demanding a club membership from you before you can have a towel. This does a lot of good things for these games: It creates more steps needed to accomplish the task at hand and helps guide the player into knowing what they can do and cannot do at each step along the way.

As for dialogue, I found the characters to be charming and have a lot of personality, but I felt their dialogue trees were too brief. I want to be able to talk to characters more about their backgrounds, ask them more questions, and spend more time with each one.

There were a few puzzles that I found to be unreasonably complex. The minigame where you had to propel yourself through space was very unclear about what direction you were facing and what direction you needed to go. There were also some "reality bending" puzzles, such as the guards for the first founder, or the entire process of talking to the third, that I wasn't prepared for. While they're clever, I feel like you need to show the player that the game recognizes that behavior in the first place.

Story and Theme:
So I believe there are a few things I missed in my playthrough, and also feel I'd need to play it again to really get some details on the story, so I can't be too critical about it at the moment. Overall, I liked the structure of the story--of needed to find each founder to access a new pod to shut off other pods and sniff out Brutus. I feel confused about the "secret" of Arcadia that drove each founder away and feel like I need to replay the game to understand more about that.

I feel that the game markets itself as this sexy fantasy, but felt that the execution was far tamer. I was expecting more Leisure Suit Larry where you can get some NSFW scenes with different guys such as the Archadian, Brutus, the couple from the second fantasy. I do like how the game has a positive take on gay characters and isn't just fetishizing everything, but I personally would rather have the style go all the way, or not be there at all and just have really strong, gay characters.

Conclusion:
All-in-all, I would say this game feels like a project done by a handful of game design students in their free time. I can feel the small scope, limited budget, and time constraints that hold this game back. There's also the fact that this game is a little buggy and doesn't even run very well on Mac (I tried and switched to PC). There's a tall grocery list of high-scope things I brought up, and I can understand why that's not entirely feasible, but if all of those things were added in future installments, I could easily see myself paying $40 for a higher-quality product. It's also something I'd love to write for myself, if given the opportunity. There's something I love about this, and would love to see this series become much bigger in the future.

As a side note, can we return the Arcadian and help him recover? The most heart-breaking things about this game was having to leave him in the asylum. All I wanted in the end was to at least rescue him and add him to the crew.

Pros:
-An overall interesting story
-No major technical issues
Cons:
-some puzzles are problematic
-most animations are not smooth

In particular pod 3 is a frustrating map puzzle.
Theres an orange glow at the edge of the screen, follow it an eventually you end up at the camp
I want to recommend this game, but the puzzle issues really were a bad part.

Theres a lot of glitches and bugs when you do most of the puzzles. It is a lot of time wasting with little to no achievement or reward to really show for any of it. I am honestly disappointed with this game.

At least on my Mac, unplayable – ‘point-and-click’ is no point, when ‘click’ does have no effect. Alas, the characters are cute.

Nice little point and click, decent story and catering to the opposite crowd, now if we could only have our own male version of Neptunia games for some hack and slah beefcake...LMAO But seriously (that was actually)...it's a nice game, having fun with it and enjoying the overall fun, and it's quite funny. Hope we can get more content like this and games for all species out there Gay and Str8 of decent quality. Happy to support it.

I discovered the game recently and bought the bundle (My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant & Escape from Pleasure Planet). I played them both back to back in order. I enjoyed both, and you can tell that the lessons learned from the first game were incorporated in Escape from Pleasure Planet.

I am a big fan of the sierra age adventure games (King’s Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Torin's Passage, etc.) and Escape from Pleasure Planet held up to that standard, with the added bonus of some relatable gay themes. The story kept me engaged, and even caught me off guard at some points. The puzzles were challenging, even for an experienced adventure gamer. Overall great game, looking forward to a third installment.

Solid, funny writing, colorful characters, positive, bright atmosphere, plenty of Star Trek references, very gay, classy execution of said gayness.

This game is a great step in a great direction. I hope it paves the way for more fun LGBT themed games in the future.

That being said, this game is far from perfect and probably only enjoyable if you're gay yourself or very involved in gay culture. Even then, it may not be - point and click, inventory-based puzzles aren't for everyone. Some issues with this game arise from (presumably) a very tight budget and limited resources; bugginess, very basic music, simple plot, no voice acting, small environments, flimsy supporting characters, very little actual animation, overall shortness of gameplay. Others (like frustrating, non-intuitive puzzles and tedious tasks) are just a staple of the genre. In any other situation, I'd say that this game is overpriced, but I'm willing to pay a little more to support an indie studio that makes cute gay video games.

I did genuinely enjoy playing this game though. While I'm happy with the lack of sexual content or nudity (there's really not any nudity that isn't just implied nudity, unless you count one scene where you see Tycho's asscrack pretty directly) my gay ass could've done with a little more gayness. There was one drag queen supporting character and she was my favorite part and I wish we could've seen more of her - that kind of thing.

All in all, this game is cute, sweet, subtly homoerotic, and a suitable substitute for an evening of watching Netflix. I'll be following this game studio, and I look forward to what they put out next, because they're doing a lot of things right. (If the devs read this and want a playtester hmu)

I really like the positive attitude. I played " my exboyfriend" but felt it was a bit of a caricature (yes, the bugginess didnt help) of itself. I really feel the atmosphere has turned into it's own queer subculture. Have just finished it, the puzzles are often wonderfully out of the box but still make sense (i remember discworld taking lateral thinking to new extremes- i also remember at some point having to open my cd-rom drive for some game , that took me quite a while to work out ) . It's also inclusive; straying from the earlier more superficial joe phillips homo-eroticism sex-comedy into something quite unusual , i think his work really fits. The prev episode also brought naughty sci-fi classics flesh gordon / barbarella to mind a bit too much ;) in this game i really like the Faith story line. Great improvement in the gameplay, enjoying every moment of it. Particularly the v-fantasies, are a great touch of positive social commentary without the " celluloid closet" misery of the average queer game (in yaoi and bara i have seen very few happy people , the forced (often brutal) relations, kind of takes away a lot of the sexiness for me ) . Showing people so vulnerable in their fantasies, feels very encouraging . Especially the nitup scenario, i hope empowers people. There's also a very natural but cartoony sensuality to this (the previous one was a bit " Are you being served?" :D ) .
All in all very good work . I have always wanted to play a combination of larry's passionate patti and space quest with queer content - lol . It could be naughtier, maybe it's a bit safe but
perhaps this opens it to a wider audience , which i think it deserves.The music in the game s very well chosen too. perfect atmospheres, very fitting.

Shem approves ! The world needs more and queerer games!

Great game on the background of first part, but if you look at it as the one of adventure genre, than you find just not very bad game with good mini-games, puzzles and a bit funny jokes. Recommend only if you're adventure fan.

Great art, not so smooth animations though. Nice humour and interesting plot. Tough puzzles and not always logical. The game would really benifit if it has real sex scenes (if The Witcher can, then why such game cannot?) instead of suggestions of it in every second dialogue))) and non-linear plot. Anyways, it's one of the very few of such genre, so there is no many to compare too, it deserves some credits.

Was really looking forward to this one, especially after having played Space Tyrant. Yeah, the unexpected call-outs (Song of Achilles heh) were still cute, but I also ended up having to slog through a whole bingo card of racist Russian stereotypes by end game. That section took up almost a fifth of the gameplay, too, and you couldn't hurry it up or skip it, and if you did anything out of order, you'd have to do it all over again. It was unpleasant the first time round, thank you very much.

An unfortunate disappointment.

Great game, maybe even better than the previous.

Pros:
Puzzles are good and not just simple point and click like Hidden Object games.
Characters are great, good continuity from the previous installment.
Music is great, I want a soundtrack.

So far the only real Bug i've come across was fixed within an Hour of me reporting it.

Good game if you enjoy the finer things in life.