Cinderella Escape! R12 Demo

You might think that bedtime stories are for children, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be changed to fit a more mature audience as well. In fact, you only need to look at what Telltale managed to do with The Wolf Among Us and realize that there’s tons of untapped potential in the genre. On the other hand, it also depends on what your definition of “mature content" is.

Cinderella Escape! R12 is not as serious or as intricate as The Wolf Among Us is, but it also targets an entirely different audience as well. Hence, this is an anime-inspired take on the famous story, which means that it features more nudity and less compelling characters. Puzzles are still the main course on the menu, but you have to explore mazes and break boxes instead.

Story-wise, everything starts like in the original Cinderella story, albeit with a touch of S&M that probably wasn’t included in the children’s version. Cinderella is a poor girl who’s constantly tormented by her stepmother and stepsisters, up until a ball is announced by the prince. Things take a rather ugly turn, on the other hand, when the prince kills the king and blames it on Cinderella. Hence, your job is to help her get out of prison and save herself.

The gameplay is quite simple and repetitive, since you mainly have to push boxes around, break them with your foot, or jump over them. There are also many traps waiting for you as well, and it gets pretty difficult to stay alive after a while. Unfortunately, there are many design mistakes and faulty mechanics at work, which makes it a pain to play the game properly.

For starters, the camera and the general character movement are awful. It’s torturous to control the camera and navigate the levels, especially since walls disappear around you and you are never certain about where you have to go. Even if most of the puzzles seem to have a logical solution after all, the process of solving them is too annoying at the moment to be worth the bother.

In the end, Cinderella Escape! R12 needs massive amounts of work before it can be released to the general public. There are just too many mistakes and inconveniences that make the experience impossible to enjoy, although you can probably still have some fun with it if your purpose is not to solve the puzzles.