Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights

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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 2 Write a review

There’s not much to say about Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights – as its charmingly awkward, late-period-Planet-of-the-Apes-sequel-ish title suggests, this is an author’s first parser game set in a generic deserted dungeon that doesn’t do more or less than you’d imagine it would. After playing the first couple of rooms I thought to myself that the prose was cleaner than I’d expected, and then immediately ran into a series of capitalization errors and an its/it’s typo soon thereafter. There’s a little bit of spooky atmosphere conjured by a statue of the eponymous knights that conspicuously doesn’t reveal what, if anything, is under their armor, which is undercut by all the rest of the tomb’s décor consisting of variations of that one statue (well, except for the parts that are skulls or coffins, both generic). There’s a gimmickless maze, but it’s basically fine; of course there’s no plot to speak of but that’s as much a relief as a negative. When playing online there’s a noticeable lag (there’s no local download option), the parser’s a bit finicky, and I couldn’t get the transcript to work, but this is a Quest game so it’s hard to hold all of that against the author.

It’s understandable why you’d take this kind of approach for your initial foray into writing a text adventure: the simple, sturdy setting and gameplay make it maximally likely that you’ll be able to complete the hardest step of the game design process, which is to say, finishing something. But it also puts a ceiling on what you can achieve – even if all the little niggles I mentioned above had been resolved, so that rather than dichotomies each sentence was unalloyed praise, it’d still be faint praise indeed. It’s in theory possible to implement this generic scenario with such quality that it’s nonetheless memorable, I suppose – as I write this, I’m recalling a game from maybe a couple years back that had a similar start-at-the-bottom-of-the-dungeon setup and was also a first-time effort, but had some interesting ornamentation and dressed up the puzzles fairly well? Ah yes, The Hidden King’s Tomb: but the fact that I had to struggle to come up with the name (this took a solid ten minutes of scrolling through my old reviews to find), and that it turns out I rated it only a 2 out of 5, perhaps makes this less of an exception than I thought when I began this anecdote.

Sadly, I doubt Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights will have much more staying power – besides the funny-ish title, my main takeaway is that I continue to really struggle with even simple puzzles in games with two-word parsers where USE is the main action you’re meant to use. Still, this is a first game, and it is entered into the Back Garden, so it’s probably unfair to set expectations too high. I’ll wrap up by paraphrasing what I said in that Hidden King’s Tomb review: this isn’t the kind of first game that’d be of much interest to anyone but the author, but it is the kind of first game that the author might have had to write in order to write a much better, much more interesting second game – and I look forward to playing that second game.

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Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/16/24
Playtime: 30min

A small first time limited parser effort, on a web platform that was new to me. So new, I can’t really say where gameplay glitches were platform- or author- driven. You wake up in a coffin and need to escape an underground tomb. As one does.

The geography is reasonably well communicated, aided by restricting itself to 4 instead of 8 cardinal directions. In addition to constraining its directional space, it also limits itself to a handful of verbs. I think this is a dynamite choice for first-time authors, but definitely challenges players accustomed to a fuller parser implementation. Its noun space is uneven, with many instances of ‘location contains an X’ ‘>X X’ ‘You see no X.’ Often, manipulating objects directly is rebuffed, and instead you must ‘>USE OTHER OBJECT’ to accomplish your task. It is possible to acclimatize to these implementations choices over time.

The puzzles themselves are reasonably straightforward with good textual cluing, including a maze section that I found to be far less than the usual annoying for these things. My playthrough was much more fighting the parser than the game’s architecture. So maybe platform based? For sure a platform problem was that it crashed midgame, and I had to wait fifteen minutes for a server reset or something to replay. (Playtime above includes first run, but not wait).

There was some implementation confusion, beyond missing noun responses. In one area, its initial description inadequately describes the objects within and then omits some exits. Other rooms had no exits listed and required directional trial-and-error. In one spot it seems like a programming parameter (MEASUREMENT) is referenced, clouding the description. Nothing dire or fatal, just more work needed. There are also typos: ‘carves’ instead of ‘carved’; ‘they figures’ instead of ‘the figures’; I stopped grabbing them after the crash.

All in all, I found it a respectable maiden effort. There was little narrative other than ‘escape!’, which, I'm in a tomb so, sure! Learning a platform requires mechanical engagement, the art can come once mastered. Look forward to seeing where the author goes from here! Maybe a little less anticipation for another encounter with this platform.

Mystery, Inc: Velma
Vibe: Escape (Multi-)Room
Polish: Distressed
Gimme the Wheel! : I think the focus on mechanical implementation is exactly right for this work. If it were mine, I would flesh out the noun space, attack typos, and fix room descriptions. Wring all the polish you can from this first effort. Engage playtesters (unless this WAS that effort! Sneaky author), and internalize all their feedback. From my own first effort I can say learning how to drive that last 5% of implementation is just as vital to IF mastery as the syntax-based first 95%.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

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