Square to publish Exit DS in Europe

Good news arrives today for us European DS owners - Square Enix has decided to publish Exit DS here and will be releasing the innovative puzzler in October.

For those of you who've missed the moderate hype surrounding this game, Exit was originally released by Ubisoft on PSP a couple of years back and proved very good. You play the game as "Mr ESC", a professional escapologist tasked with rescuing people from a variety of situations, mostly involving fires, floods and so on.

The game's 100+ levels are each like a mini-puzzle, with you using the individual abilities of both Mr ESC and his various assembled victims in order to escape.

These victims range from kids - who can only climb low obstacles but can squeeze through little gaps, to fatty adults who can push things out of the way but need the help of others to climb, to injured people who need to be carried.

Additionally taxing the brain are fires that need to be extinguished, levers that need to be pulled and doors that need to be unlocked. You probably get the idea how the concept works. It's all done very stylishly, with cool cel-shaded visuals and neat people animations.

After its PSP release, Exit was ported to DS and released in Japan at the start of 2008 complete with touchscreen controls. I've played it and can confirm they work very well. However that was so long ago it's easy to almost forget Exit never actually made it out anywhere else. The DS version also lets you upload your mission completion times via wi-fi to show the world.

If you missed it on PSP, I'd wholeheartedly recommend you keep an eye out for this one come October. Gawd bless you Square for making sure we eventually get to play it.