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Designing the puzzles of Escapade!
An article describing the design process of the game's puzzles

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Escapade!

by Juhana Leinonen profile

Comedy
2008

Web Site

(based on 17 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

An entry in the 2008 One Room Game Competition. You play the bumbling sidekick of the heroic Captain McBrawn; while trying to carry out a task he's set you, you are captured by the Screaming Communists and imprisoned in a mediaeval castle. Your task is to escape.


Game Details


Awards

Nominee, Best Puzzles; Nominee, Best Individual Puzzle; Nominee, Best Individual NPC - 2008 XYZZY Awards

Editorial Reviews

SPAG
Some wonderfully deft comic writing enliven this otherwise fairly standard escape-the-prison-cell game. Humor is of course notoriously subjective, as I learn again every time I am left cold by another game most reviewers find hilarious. Thus I can't guarantee how you will react to this one, but can say that I found it to have some of the funniest, freshest IF writing of 2008.
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Member Reviews

5 star:
(2)
4 star:
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Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 2
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Great potential let down by the implementation, November 25, 2008
by Kake (London, England)
Related reviews: ***, One-Room Game Competition 2008, Juhana Leinonen

All you have to do, as the bumbling sidekick of the gorgeous, muscular Captain McBrawn, is find the World President and warn him of an impending attack - but before you can even get started, you're captured by the Screaming Communists and dumped into a locked, barred room high up in a tower in a mediaeval castle. Unsurprisingly, your task is to get out - though this task isn't actually as simple or as trite as it might sound.

It took me a little while to get started on this one, mainly because of "guess the verb" problems - and these problems persisted throughout the game, making it harder, more frustrating, and less fun than it really needed to be. A little fleshing-out of the rather sparse descriptions of some of the items might have helped too.

The hint system also broke down at one point, giving me the same hint over and over again for a problem that I'd already solved, so I eventually had to resort to the walkthrough.

I didn't really enjoy this game, and that's basically down to the implementation. The constant "you can't do that" stuff made it really frustrating to play - so frustrating that I don't want to play it again to find the optional bits that I missed. This is a real shame; it could be so much better. I do hope the author makes a second release that addresses these issues, since there's a good game in here struggling to get out.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
An enjoyable mid-length escape game with multiple solutions and a demon, February 3, 2016

Escapade! did well in the one-room competition in 2008. In this game, you are captured by screaming communists and placed in a cell with a dark and mysterious figure who turns out to be of some use.

The idea is that you have to repeatedly escape from the room using a variety of methods. Some things that I didn't know beforehand that were helpful are that you only have to find a fraction of the escapes (a little more than half) to win, and that some escapes are no longer possible after a while.

This is a funny game, and the humor was dry and situational (Except for the guard's voice), making it pretty funny to me. I enjoyed the puzzles; they were of the same style as Enlightenment or To Hell in a Hamper, where you take a bunch of items and run with them. If you enjoyed those two games, you should really enjoy this one.

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Escapade! on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Escapade! appears in the following Recommended Lists:

The People's Revolutionary Game List by verityvirtue
Games set in dystopias inspired by the Soviet Union. Often involves bureaucracy, wrongful imprisonment and revolution. Suggestions welcome.

Polls

The following polls include votes for Escapade!:

All the Pretty Sources by Jeremy Freese
IF games that have source code available that you'd hold up as an example of what good looking source code is supposed to look like. (I was motivated to post this by wanting to study some I7 source, but actually pretty source from other...

Games with stupid player characters by murphy_slaw
I'm looking for games where the player character is significantly stupider and/or less observant than the average player - the kind of game where part of the challenge is making sense of the descriptions offered through the simplistic...

Up, Up, and Away: IF starring super heroes by Molly
It's often been said that super-heroes are a poor fit for IF, given the reliance of the former on flashy, colorful costumes and fights. But let it never be said that some poor bastards didn't try. What are some notable attempts at...

See all polls with votes for this game




This is version 12 of this page, edited by Juhana on 25 September 2021 at 4:38pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page