Escape Plan looks to be the breakout hit of the launch lineup, a darkly comic puzzle-platform game done in artsy chiaroscuro (a kind of high contrast black and white) that looks like Tim Burton had a hand in its inception (he didn’t). It stars a pair of oddball creatures dubbed Lil and Laarg making their way through a bunch of booby-trapped rooms — you control them using the Vita’s front and rear touch panels (imagine using your fingers to trace paths or clear obstacles and save the game’s protagonists from a bunch of Rube Goldberg death machines).
Why it’s promising: Remember Fat Princess (rescue the monarch’s daughter, feed her cake to make her so fat that your enemies have difficulty moving her)? Alas, the studio that designed Fat Princess ceased to exist last year, but three of its team members went on to form Fun Bits, Escape Plan’s developer. The media buzz from hands-on previews is that this is the Vita game to get.