My son Charlie leaves home in a few weeks. He will be 3,000 miles away. My heart is breaking. I decide we need one more formative games playing experience. Something we can bond over, that will maybe teach him a few life lessons along the way.
A Way Out (PS4, Windows, Xbox One) is a two-player co-op game that has you trying to escape from a prison. It sounds like a perfect father-son activity. Five minutes in, my son’s character is naked, being most aggressively hosed down after an inmate tells him: “You think I’m a pussy? I fuck people up.” Understandably, I’m wondering whether this will be the light, fun bonding experience I’d hoped for.
Things improve when we end up in the hospital wing and have to work together to distract guards and steal stuff. We’re bonding, for sure. And now my son knows how to get his hands on a shiv if he is ever in prison. Who knows what will happen when he is on the other side of the world from me?
At one point my character says to his: “It is my plan. I decide what’s going down, OK?” This is pretty much how I parent. I hope this may finally teach Charlie why, in real life, he ought to listen to what I have to say. Then my guy says: “You fuck this up? I’ll kill you myself!”, which admittedly is a little more extreme than my parenting style. But only just.
We laugh. A lot. We laugh at our running gag about how many times my character Leo says that everything smells like shit. We laugh while playing the wonderfully silly minigames that crop up in the middle of otherwise serious situations, whether that’s competitive dips in the prison yard or the truly wonderful scene where, pursued by cops and with a couple of hostages locked in the cupboard upstairs, our characters practise, then duet, on piano and banjo.
It’s not all laughs. We also have intense debates as to what to do when the game gives us choices between violence and reason. Then we laugh again as I leave his character stranded on a pulley halfway across a barn – for the second time.
Best of all? The slow pace and ludicrously easy gameplay allow us to talk while playing. I’ve never really done that before. But every part of this game provides a launching pad for chat. A scene where they go fishing has us reminiscing about catching mackerel off the dock of an island in Atlantic Canada when he was five, then cooking them on a fire. Glorious days that this game helps us relive. Although we used actual fishing rods, as opposed to branches sharpened with a knife while on the run from the cops in a forest.
When the characters are playing baseball, we talk about the one game I took him to (aged nine) that lasted so long we never went again, but we had the best fish and chips ever on the way home. When they play basketball, we laugh as we remember a parent complaining about him being too aggressive during a game when he was seven, only for Charlie to shout from the centre of the court: “I am NOT aggressive, just clumsy!”
We talk about the most random stuff after it appears in the game: from homages to various crime movies, to furniture, to what he was like as a baby (amazing!), to how he’d rather have a treehouse now aged 18 than at five. The game becomes secondary. I’m hanging out with a pal, having a laugh – except the pal is my son.
There are darker parts for sure. I’m not sure how I feel about Charlie and I with our characters’ hands on either end of a length of cord, slowly choking a man to death. He was an assassin sent to kill us, I suppose, so maybe that is another life lesson for Charlie. Like I said before, I don’t know what it’s going to be like at uni.
The longer we play, the more we realise that the characters we have picked are the opposite to our roles of father and son in real life. I have picked the volatile, impetuous, immature character; my son, the more reasoned, mature leader. Is that because we are both trying to be those things to each other? I am trying to show him I can still be fun and youthful; he wants me to know he can be mature enough to leave home?
After the credits roll, we talk about how we loved the dazzling cinematic switches between characters, the superb plot twist near the end and the outstanding, emotional ending – one of the best we can remember to any game. Then I realise that it’s the first co-op game I have ever completed with another human being. And I did it with my son, which feels amazing. But like the time he has spent with me at home, it is over all too soon.
