White House Escape

"White House Escape" takes a totally implausible premise (that during an emergency lockdown at the White House, you'd be free to wander around until you found the red telephone to call out) and combines it with basic lock and key puzzles and a vast, mostly empty map. Prose is serviceable at best, with many passages that sound like guidebook parody. Many rooms do not allow interaction with any of their contents, even when it might seem that the scenery would be useful in some way. The stripped-down aesthetic is reminiscent of an amateur work from the 80s -- not a Scott Adams product, but something produced by one of his admirers.

That's not to say that the game is unambitious or careless; it's just that the designer's effort went into other things. The interface has been heavily customized for the iPhone. Room descriptions appear in text, but are kept to a couple of sentences to make for easy on-screen reading. Scrolling verb/noun menus replace a keyboard for input. The inventory is supplemented with images of the objects carried, and there are overhead map views of the White House to aid in navigation. It would look better with a little more attention to graphical design, as the maps are a bit on the garish side, but on the whole it is an interface deliberately tuned for its device.

Clearly some of the emptiness of the map is also dictated by the designer's wish to represent the White House as it really is: the layout appears to be extremely accurate. Nonetheless, the descriptions are too sparse to allow the piece serve as an engaging diorama or educational virtual tour of the building.

It's a pity that the effort and enthusiasm are not in service of a somewhat more compelling, playable game.