I Will Escape, an indie adventure/stealth game built entirely in Blender, has been greenlit for Valve’s Steam download service.
Game engines are a dime a dozen, but free game engines are a different story entirely. Sure, there are plenty of programs that brag about being free or open source out there, but most are either stilted in capabilities or have their best features limited by a pay wall. Blender is often considered to fall into the first camp; a game making utility built into one of the most popular free 3D modeling programs? Surely such a thing cant be used to build anything of quality.
Blue Label Studio wants to prove you wrong.
I Will Escape is an ambitious project, to be sure. It’s a game built in an engine never used before for a title of its scale, by a small indie team with high hopes of making it just the tip of the iceberg on a much larger story spanning at least three games. Blender has never been seen as the easiest program in the world to work with, and its included game engine has been available for almost ten years; it will take a lot of luck for Blue Label Studio to hit the break they need to make the project a success.
They’ve gotten that first bit of luck already, with I Will Escape getting successfully greenlit on Steam.
I Will Escape is an adventure/stealth game focusing around the character of Brian Lowfield, who wakes up in prison with no idea of how or why he is there. All that he has is a picture of a young girl, and a will to escape and discover his past. To do so, he will need to employ every bit of wits he has to sneak out of the prison, past guards, puzzles, and more.
There is a lot of obvious influence in I Will Escape from stealth games of the past like Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid, though the lack of obvious combat mechanics in any of the preview images suggests a very different approach to the genre, and though Blender’s game engine definitely shows its age the game’s stealth and interface mechanics seem well managed so far.
Blue Label Studio is looking to release I Will Escape on both Steam and Desura near the end of 2014, where the game will be available for play on PC, Mac, and Linux.