WWII Elevator Escape

Titles are one of the many things I struggle with when writing my own IF, so I always perk up when I come across one that seems to scoff at the idea that naming stuff is hard. What could the game about escaping from an elevator during World War II possibly be called other than WWII Elevator Escape? Admittedly the “WWII” part is a bit superficial. Per the opening story, you’re a member of the German Resistance who’s just gathered a key bit of intelligence by attending a meeting with Hitler while undercover – now your cover’s been blown and you need to get to the roof and parachute off it to make it to the rendezvous point. But as for the elevator escaping, yeah, you’ll be spending most of your time on that.

This is a short parser puzzle game that runs on a tight timer, with Nazi guards gunning you down unless you do everything right. And friend, you are not going to do everything right. There’s zero margin of error: if the elevator dallies too long on one floor, the bad guys are likely to tromp up the stairwell and gun you down. If you just try to ride the elevator straight up to the roof, unknowing passengers are likely to stymie your efforts (and tell the guards which way you were going when they last saw you). You do start with a couple of potentially-helpful items in your inventory, and some relatively straightforward puzzles will allow you to manipulate some of the elevator’s features in your favor. But sussing out how you can evade the Nazis, and then coming up with the step-by-step implementation of that plan, is intentionally difficult.

I do sometimes like these kinds of trial-and-error optimization puzzles, and I did get some enjoyment from figuring out how the well-implemented elevator’s different mechanisms worked. The prose is also clean and focused, providing detailed feedback on exactly what’s happening in each turn. But I couldn’t for the life of me get a handle on what I should be trying to do – no matter what I tried, the Nazis always got to the roof just ahead of me (the fact that many parser errors make time advance made this extra frustrating). Fortunately, there’s a hint system, because I’ll admit that while the solution makes sense in retrospect, it relies on a couple of leaps of logic, as well as a nonstandard command I don’t think most parser systems accept by default, so I doubt I ever would have gotten it.

Luckily for my self-esteem, actually parachuting off the roof once you arrive requires solving a second, smaller puzzle, that likewise relies on timing and idiosyncratic commands, but here I had a much easier time understanding the assignment and the obstacles, and the use of the nonstandard verb was more directly prompted. It still took a fair bit of trial and error to complete, but nothing a bit of UNDOing didn’t solve. The challenge of a game as focused as this one is that if the player isn’t sufficiently motivated by what’s on offer, they won’t commit to the many, many deaths required to make progress. But if that’s the case, you can’t say the title isn’t fair warning – this is a game that does exactly what it says on the tin.