The End Means Escape

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.