The Horrible Escape Room of Horror

I was delighted by this game. It's in the author nilsf's custom javascript parser system (I believe), which has always been on par with the big 3 of Inform, TADS and Dialog.

It's a short two-room game. At first, I was entirely stymied on what to do. There were several cryptic messages and a way to die but that's all. I was about to post a hint request, but carefully replaying the game to describe the setup gave me the hint I needed to succeed.

The second room had a lot going on. I felt like there just wasn't enough info to proceed, but when I finally figured out what the vials were for, I was really impressed with the solution. Finally, figuring out the skulls was a real unusual thing that was not something I've seen very often at all in parser games.

So, this was great. There were a few typos (I think a wall was called 'souther') and I had trouble referring to one vial, but otherwise this worked great, and I'm impressed it was put together in such short time.

I've been a fan of the author's work ever since The Curse of the Scarab. Some authors have a signature style where if you play one of their games without knowing it was created by them, you still think, huh, this reminds me of so-and-so's work. That's how I feel about this author. I love the custom parser and scenery-oriented puzzles that reward the player for paying close attention to details in their surroundings.

And so, I was delighted to try The Horrible Escape Room of Horror. It's an Ectocomp 2025 entry in the La Petite Mort category, which means it was created under four hours.

"Well Rhoda", you think to yourself, "this is even worse than that time four years ago in Egypt."

You are Rhoda. As in Rhoda Tarcrew who may sound familiar to anyone who has played The Curse of the Scarab. But instead of exploring an entire tomb, this adventure involves escaping a room after snatching the Staff of the Owl. (Spoiler - click to show)Well, two rooms, technically.

In a corner is a deep pit. There's also a cabinet here with a papyrus laying on top.

Despite what (Spoiler - click to show)the title suggests, I was delighted to see that there are two rooms available to us. While I'm going to steer clear from outright spoiling the puzzles, I still suggest that you try the game first before continuing.

Story is limited to our objective of escaping. Instead, it focuses on puzzle solving, and I think this is a good balance considering it’s a rather short game. In fact, the (Spoiler - click to show)table puzzle took up most of my time.

That’s about it! I had a lot of fun stepping into Rhoda’s shoes once again. I’m taking off a star because the implementation could be sharper and I saw some spelling errors, but I do so reluctantly because the game was created under four hours. I was quite impressed.