The End Means Escape

This is one of the weirdest games I have yet played. You are thrust into a room where every single object speaks. After talking to them, you are placed in a puzzle where you can physically manipulate the words in the room description. After that, you enter a bizarre world with doll-like humans you can move around, undress, and interact with. Then a bizarre maze, and finally a nonsensical last world with bizarre symbology.

I honestly have no idea what was going on here, but the puzzles are more or less pretty fun.

Recommended for fans of the bizarre and weird.

This is a hard one for me to rate, because in some areas it really excels, while in other areas it falls flat.

For instance, its opening scene, with the varying personalities you encounter and the unique way you get information about the room drew me in quickly. Immediately afterwards, there was a puzzle that made zero sense to me. The hints only helped to a point, but the puzzle needed more context.

After that, the scene turns creepy and isolated in a way I don't see too often in IF. Loved that. But the puzzle itself turned into a frustrating experiment in reading the author's mind. Boo. (At least the built-in-hints helped.) Then a maze with a clever solution that I enjoyed puzzling out.

The final scene had an interesting puzzle and setting, but I had zero idea who I was. What was I now? What had I been in the first scene? Why do I care? Why did the maze lead to this?

Great puzzles and moody sets are all fine and good, but if they're going to be so disjointed in theme, the character (or something! anything!) should be a unifying, overarching thread so it doesn't feel like a cafeteria lady serving up IF puzzles wearing a Halloween mask to be mysterious.

I played this right after finishing An Open Field. Here's my conclusion: those two games should've traded some ideas. OPEN FIELD, while initially disorienting, ends with a clear background concept; by the end, you knew who you were, what your situation was, and what your goal would be as that character. However, OPEN FIELD lacked implementation that would've made it a standout work.

THE END MEANS has implementation up the ying-yang. (Just "x young" in the second scene of THE END MEANS...you'll understand.)

If you like puzzles, try out THE END MEANS ESCAPE. If you're looking for more story to go with your IF, you may want to sit this one out.

If you are a completionist who happens to encounter this game, then you will find the title to be 100% accurate: The end is your escape from this muddled, nonsensical mess.

I agree with Paul O'Brien that it is "rather disconcerting to be thrown into this environment without even a halfhearted explanation about what was happening," but unlike O'Brien I never found The End Means Escape to become absorbing. The first fifty moves generated only hostility from the talking objects in the first puzzle, after which came my first use of >HINT and then a brute force "exploration" of oodles of combinatorial unproductive responses.

After working out that it's possible to (Spoiler - click to show)>UNLOCK DOOR WITH SCISSORS (which seems to accomplish nothing), I looked back over the various responses and tried (Spoiler - click to show)>BALLOON, RUB FLOOR. All well and good, and then I got the balloon to pick up another object. Then another fifty moves without progress, at which point >HINT tells me that I need to... do exactly what I've just done (which had no effect). And won't give any further hints until I do that. I don't know whether the issue is a consequence of the context sensitivity of the built-in hints or a bug in the program logic, or both. The only solution I found was a restart.

Several reviewers cite this first scenario as the game's high point. Should you somehow plow through it, your reward is another completely ungrounded scenario, this one featuring moving words around. This is an interesting mechanic, but here, devoid of useful context, it is reduced to a mere tech demo. You can try to "solve" this, if you like, but my suggestion is to just use the walkthrough.

Past this, we get to even weirder interactions with dead bodies of a type one reviewer (Danielle) called "creepy" and another (Tina Sikorski) deemed "icky." Enticing, huh? Even the walkthrough notes: "Ewww...That was gross."

Next: a maze with an unusual solution but not one I enjoyed. And finally, a metaphor for... who can say for sure? Fortunately, this last segment is quick enough even without hints.

There appears to be no raison d'etre for this work -- it's just a pile of detail implementation utterly lacking in story or any other observable coherence. As Adam Cadre summarizes it: "... goal, please?" One reviewer suggests that the unifying feature is that "each [tableau] has as its basis understanding or at least discovering the nature of something," but that's a core basic of puzzle-oriented interactive fiction, not something novel to this work.

A smart person that I talked to about this game noted: "Surrealism isn't a pass to make no sense and then pretend it's more meaningful." Other reviewers delicately dance around the point, but I will not: When not actively repugnant, this piece is at best a waste of time.

The End Means Escape is clearly the product of a lot of genuine effort on the part of the author, and it just barely manages to claw its way out of one-star territory (i.e. "no redeeming qualities") by virtue of a few mechanical parts worth a closer look for their effect on mood and tone. However, don't expect to enjoy this one even if you choose to study it, and my advice to pure players is to steer clear.