Being the hero is something that we all dream of at least once – playing the part of the valiant knight rescuing the fair damsel in distress and riding off into the sunset on a magnificent white steed to live happily ever after. Unfortunately when it comes to be a real world hero – none of that fantasy stuff here – most of us turn out to be complete bottlers, happy to let someone else get the glory, just as long as we don’t have to risk our own skin.

Mr ESC is one such hero, putting life and limb on the line to rescue victims of disasters ranging from burning buildings to flooding subways and everything in between. However, he has no delusions of grandeur, he knows there are no fairytale happy endings. His flirtation with danger is a career choice, for Mr ESC is a professional escapologist, putting his life on the line only if you can pay his bill – and he’s accepting all major credit cards.

This may sound like a mercenary way of doing things, but even Spider-Man was considering charging for his services before he realised that with great power comes great responsibility.

Don’t worry though – Mr ESC’s questionable business activities aren’t the source for endless in-game moralising, but to establish him as one of the coolest characters to grace the PSP’s screen. With his little hat and flowing scarf, Mr ESC runs, jumps and climbs his way through 100 levels of disaster-struck structures, rescuing scores of civilians along the way. However, these civilians aren’t as helpless as they first appear, because for Mr ESC to achieve his goals, he will need their help.

This is the main thrust of Exit: co-operation. Essentially a puzzle game playing a bit like a cross between old-favourites Lemmings and Elevator Action, Exit requires the use of both skill and strategy to get Mr ESC and the civilians out alive. Each of the three civilian ‘types’ – and Mr ESC himself – has its own strengths and weaknesses, which you have to utilise to get past the various obstacles. Children are the weakest, but can crawl through small spaces; young adults are good all-rounders and adults are the strongest, but the least agile.

The levels are deviously designed to get you thinking about each move, meticulously planning before committing yourself. This habit is at first hard to get into, as Exit doesn’t wear its puzzling credentials on its sleeve – instead they are hidden beneath stylish visuals and platform-style controls, causing you to rush into things until you train yourself to play the game how it wants you to play.

However, the game seems to only have one precise way it wants you to play, which is what accounts for the score you see at the end of this review. In the best puzzle games you are encouraged to do your best to beat the game, to apply whatever solution you can come up with to get onto the next level, or beat the high score. With Exit, though, there is pretty much only one way to do things on each level, with almost no room for improvisation.

The only way to avoid this pitfall is to plan ahead, but the game throws a whole new set of obstacles at you when it comes to doing this. For a start, you can’t pause and look at the map, which possibly wouldn’t be so bad if the map actually showed you something, but it’s very basic. You can use the analogue nub to scroll the camera, but it has limits to how far you can look ahead. Time and time again you’ll have to restart the level because you made a mistake, which is nothing but annoying.

This is a shame, because Exit could have been a real treat. There are some really neat ideas and great variety in the levels and the way to tackle them, but the whole experience is let down by the trial-and-error gameplay, which is almost a total game breaker (and not in the EA sense). This type of gaming was tolerated back in the day, when games like Lemmings were popular, but today we expect puzzle games to offer an evolving challenge that rewards creative thinking, which Exit doesn’t.

Jude Salmon