The five prisons of The Escapists 3
Five distinct prisons ship at launch — dense forests, gusty canyons, ancient catacombs and dangerous waters among them. Team17 promises no single solution: dig, climb, cut or glide your way out.
The short version
The Escapists 3 ships with five distinct prisons at launch. Team17's announcement teases four of them by setting: dense forests, gusty canyons, ancient catacombs and dangerous waters. The fifth is still under wraps. What is already clear is that escaping is not one puzzle per map — the studio promises "no single solution", and the trailer shows at least five different techniques being put to work.
The five prisons: what has been teased
| Setting | What Team17 says |
|---|---|
| Dense forests | One of the five prisons — "lose yourself in dense forests" |
| Gusty canyons | "Climb across gusty canyons" — wind implied as a mechanic |
| Ancient catacombs | "Explore ancient catacombs" — suggests a buried, older layer to escape through |
| Dangerous waters | "Find your way across dangerous waters" — a coastal or flooded route |
| Prison #5 | Kept back for a later reveal |
The variety is deliberate: the announcement sells the game as five sandboxes with "plenty of bad ideas" between them, and the outdoor biomes are exactly the kind of spaces the series' move to full 3D was built to serve.
Escape routes seen so far
Across the trailer and official screenshots, these are the escape vectors Team17 has put on camera:
- Cutting through fences — the perimeter is a surface, not a boundary
- Tunnelling under walls — the signature move, now with deeper soil physics
- Rappelling up walls — vertical routes that did not exist in the 2D entries
- Hang gliding — the new item that turns a rooftop into an exit
- Sneaking past security — screenshots show monitoring beams around a pool area
- Disguises and hordes of guards — fighting your way out is one flavour of breakout among many
Life inside is the other half of the map
Every prison in the series is really two games at once: the routine you perform and the system you subvert. The reveal footage leans into the mundane-institutional texture — cafeteria service, laundry lines, rec time, roll call — precisely so the breakouts have something to break out of. Jobs earn cash, cash buys supplies, supplies become tools; the loop starts uneventfully on purpose.
No single solution
The design promise, again from Matt Burnill's dev Q&A: "You can rush for the exit, fight your way through a horde of guards, or you can chill out with your friends, completing daily routines whilst quietly digging a big old tunnel under the prison." And the summary line the studio keeps repeating: "Every prison is a system waiting to be understood, exploited and very badly outsmarted."
For planning purposes, treat each prison as a sandbox with several valid routes — quiet, loud, vertical, subterranean — and a guard rotation worth watching before you commit. The co-op guide covers how to split those routes between players.
