Announcing The Escapists 3! 🏃💨

08 Oct 2026Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Escapists... we are so BACK 🙌 Announcing The Escapists 3, arriving in 2027!

Plan ridiculous prison breaks, outsmart the guards and escape your way in The Escapists 3. Craft, sneak, fight and improvise through a new 3D prison sandbox, alone or with friends!

Watch video on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

🔑 Key Features - The Escapists 3:

👮 Prison has rules, you have other plans: Learn the routine and watch the guards, take jobs and earn cash, swipe whatever isn’t nailed down and turn everyday junk into the beginnings of an escape plan.

🫵 Escape your way: Every prison is a system waiting to be understood, exploited and very badly outsmarted. Dig beneath the walls, climb your way out or find another route entirely.

🪥 Rubbish can become your freedom: Search cells, trade with inmates and complete jobs to get your hands on supplies. Almost anything can become part of an escape plan. Whether it should…that’s another question.

⛓️ Five Prisons with plenty of bad ideas: Break out of five distinctive prisons. Lose yourself in dense forests, climb across gusty canyons, explore ancient catacombs and find your way across dangerous waters.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Better with Accomplices: Try and escape solo or team up with friends. Play with two players in local split-screen, or take your escape online with up to four. Divide the jobs, play to each other's strengths, coordinate the timing and execute the perfect prison break… and discover which of your friends is useless with a shovel.

💬 Devlog Q&A with Matt Burnill

To celebrate this exciting announcement, we sat down with Matt Burnill, Creative Manager at team17 (and also game designer on The Escapists 1, The Escapists The Walking Dead, The Escapists 2, and The Survivalists), to discuss all things The Escapists 3.

❔What is The Escapists 3 all about, and why bring the franchise back now?

"On the surface, it’s a prison escape game. But really, it’s this massive sandbox filled with systems, varying gameplay and puzzles for people to test themselves against.

It’s about creativity, thinking on the fly, adapting to things going wrong. It lets you experience prison life at your own pace; 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. I’m really just scratching the surface too; there’s so much here to ensure there’s never just one way to escape."

❔Why switch from 2D to 3D for the next game in The Escapists series, and what positive changes does the 3D art style bring to The Escapists 3?

"When we were thinking about what we wanted to do next with Escapists, all the new features and experiences we wanted players to enjoy, the expectations from a sandbox world- 3D just made sense.

Like something as simple as the physics, we wanted to bring the sandbox to life, to feel tangible and interactive; we want players to have those moments where they ask themselves, “Wait, can I just push this guard down the stairs to knock them out?”, and it just works as they expected. It enables us to bring more to the world and cement the idea of “yeah, now this is a step up from Escapists 2”.

Naturally, we haven’t abandoned the pixel art style either. Our roots are firmly planted there. Hopefully people notice the homages in the art style, the pixel flourishes, the callbacks in the level design. It’s nice in a way, because even though it’s 3D, everyone that’s played has said: “Yeah, this feels like Escapists”. So much of the core gameplay is retained from previous games that makes Escapists as unique as it is- they’ve not gone anywhere. There’s still routines, favours, hiding items in vents and we’ve just expanded upon it to make it bigger than ever. And anyway, so many of the greatest games have this moment in their history, Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, GTA, this is our landmark moment!"

❔ How much freedom does the player have when planning and executing their escape?

"They’ll have more freedoms than I can list, and honestly more than we have predicted. That’s the exciting part. We’re filling the game with tools for players to get creative with, the amount of permutations that unlocks will be insane.

Of course, crafting and Items are in the game, and we’ve created a whole range of familiar and new silly items to play with; shovels, pickaxes and cutters in all their forms are back, and then new items like the Hang Glider that lets players soar wherever their hearts desire. On top of that, we’ve reworked the Stats system into a brand new Skill Tree system; players are rewarded XP for all manner of actions around the Prison (you don’t have to lol at cats for hours on end), which they can then use to pick new Skills such as the Hinge Buster, which will allow them to smash their way through a locked door.

I’m looking forward to people playing co-op, creating different roles amongst themselves and forming an elite prison escape team that’s ready for anything.

❔ In our trailer for The Escapists 3, you see a ragtag quartet of escapists, including Jimmy Locke. Who is Jimmy Locke, and give a brief overview of what players can expect from him in The Escapists 3?

"Jimmy is, of course, the world's greatest escapist! He’s been here since Escapists 2 (top marks to anyone that remembers him from The Escapists 2 marketing), wowing the masses with his cunning escape attempts.

In Escapists 3, he’s on hand to help guide the player, because nothing inflates his ego more than telling people how to escape properly. I don’t want to give too much away, so let’s just say he’s always about, even when you don’t know it…"