Escape Doodland is yet another of several hundred, if not thousands of garbage low effort endless runners plaguing Steam. It's a handheld (Nintendo Switch)/console game that's also been put on Steam as a bit of an afterthought, as it's very much designed for the handheld/console gaming audience.

Like all endless/autorunners, you're moving and you can't stop. All you can do is avoid the obstacles/jump across the platforms coming at you in this incredibly shallow shovelware game. Sure, on one hand you might really like the clutzy "doodle" art, or you might see it as more an attempt to push a lazy and valueless game format with as little effort being put into the visuals as went into the gameplay design. Remember... gaming is a visual medium. And gamers spend thousands of dollars on high end rigs so they can enjoy cutting edge 3D visuals. So what are we supposed to say when we get this amateur hand drawn Nintendo Switch shovelware instead? Yeah.

One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The artwork here is terrible, it's all just amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.

While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.

PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for.

Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Escape Doodland didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "You are dead", for dying (something that playing an endless runner made for the Nintendo Switch would make anyone want to do), trivial to get, but less than 26 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, even the people who own this game weren't interested in it.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Escape Doodland has the preposterous price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "7 Days to Die", "Deep Rock Galactic" or "The Vanishing of Ethan Carter". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.