Escapade!

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.

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.