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1-5 of 54 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A random maze and an interesting premise, January 7, 2023Adapted from a review on intfiction.org
Best I can tell, You May Not Escape! is a parser-based IF built around a random map generator and a premise.
The random maps are the less-interesting of the two cornerstones. Notably, the author has asked that players not share their maps online as “getting lost and the entering the unknown is part of the point.” That leads to the second notable foundation of YMNE!: It’s premise.
You start in an outdoor maze of high plaster walls, too high to scale, which you must navigate while the weather grows worse and worse. A purported guide named John Everyman (not terribly subtle) acknowledges your obvious questions—Why am I here? What is this place?—while sidestepping to offer any real answers. Intriguingly, he suggests many others (“billions”) have or are traversing their own mazes while you walk yours.
Then the conversation lulls, your questions bruise Everyman’s feelings, and there’s nothing left to do but traverse the labyrinth.
Walking the maze is minimalism itself. Locations are described in fleeting, often incomplete, sentences. Occasionally the stingy maze generator manages to cough up a park bench to sit on, or a closed-circuit camera spying on you, but most locations don’t even offer those variations.
At this point, YMNE started to look to me to be little more than an exercise in Inform coding–until I encountered the LED ticker-tape-style wall displays. Each offers a different message, sometimes taunting, sometimes misleading, sometimes patronizing. The messages serve to frustrate and confuse in an already frustrating and confusing game. (The ticker machines do serve one handy purpose: They tell you when you’re walking in circles, or have returned to a previously-visited location.)
Game play develops into the monotony of a foot soldier’s patrol as you wander in search of an exit. With each scrap of new information found, one will naturally try to piece together What It All Means. Some of the details hint at modern controversies, such dead-naming. Others offer empty sentiments for your predicament. Others still are accusatory and self-righteous. The game is patently designed to wear down the player (at one point, giving up is a formal option). It’s a bleak ride.
So: What does it all mean? Just as the author asked not to share maps online, I’m reluctant to share my full interpretation. I do think YMNE! is a reaction to social media and toxic culture online, although the abuse could be sourced from any number of dysfunctional situations. One of the ticker messages is political speech transcribed, the “thoughts and prayers” mantra rattled off after every tragedy:
"The phrase 'thoughts and prayers' is grating in part because it has become a victim of semantic satiation, a phenomenon that occurs when a word or words is repeated so often that it loses its meaning. Thoughts and prayers has become a little bit like saying 'bless you' after someone sneezes…"
That said, I do wish the game had been a bit more ambitious. I would gladly have given up a freshly-minted maze with each quarter dropped for a richer world and more immersion. I think that could have been achieved without losing the stark economy of the prose and setting, which is game’s calling card. More tongue-in-cheek, I was tempted to shave off a point for the use of an exclamation point in the title, but I won't do that.
Bottom-line, I found myself chewing on this game after I finished playing it. A little more oomph would have left me chewing on YMNE! much longer, though.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
A thematically resonant maze game, January 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
The randomizer continues to send me games that rhyme; You May Not Escape!, much like One Final Pitbull Song, communicates what it’s like to live a marginalized existence through a combination of satire and allegory. This one’s a parser game, though, and cleverly expresses its themes through a slight recontextualization of typical parser gameplay element (in keeping with parser tradition, it’s a lonelier experience too, lacking the found-family gaggle of OFPS). While the ending didn’t fully land for me, and I think the game maybe errs a little too much towards abstraction, it’s still a neat marriage of narrative and crossword, with clean implementation that’s especially impressive for what I think is the author’s first parser game.
Now that I’ve said all that, this is a maze game. Wait, come back! Yes, 90% of the gameplay is wandering around a big, nearly-empty maze, and if you’re allergic to that sort of thing you probably won’t enjoy yourself here (I have to confess, it’s not my personal favorite). But that’s integral to the premise of the game: you’ve been chosen, through a process whose exact operation isn’t clear but which is clearly deeply unfair, to be thrown into a maze. There is an exit, you’re assured by the representative who greets you upon your entry, but it may or may not be unlocked. Still, there’s nothing for it but to try.
This is clearly a bone-dry premise, but it’s not too hard to suss out what it’s in service of. When you ask the representative why you’ve been picked for the maze, he’s a bit shift, but admits “[i]t could be based on any number of factors. Your body, your mind, your home, your clothes – any of these could make you eligible.” As you explore the maze, you come across screens where outside observers seem to be commenting on your situation, sometimes offering not-very-helpful advice, sometimes sending thoughts and prayers, and sometimes vituperatively wishing for bad things to happen to you. And one of the points of interest in the labyrinth is a graveyard with four tombstones – one’s being readied for you, making clear the graves are for those who never escape the maze, while the others appear to be victims of right-wing politics (as best I can make out, there’s a trans woman, a woman who died because she wasn’t able to get an abortion, and some people who were killed by a fire in a gay bar).
It doesn’t take much deductive reasoning to understand that the game is articulating something about what it feels like to face explicit discrimination and hatred, and the implicit challenges of living in a world not designed for you, with the metaphor being sufficiently supple to accommodate several different angles on the idea. It makes sense, then, that navigating your way through the landscape should be difficult, confusing, and fairly depressing. Thus it’s no surprise that exploration is unpleasant: there are lots of twists and turns, with few landmarks and many locations that look exactly the same. Moreover, it quickly begins to rain, soaking you and making the dirty-floored maze muddy as all get-out. And – shocker of shockers – when you get to the exit, it turns out it is indeed locked.
Or at least it was in my game – for the maze is procedurally generated. This is another nice thematic twist, since of course while many marginalized folks face similar barriers, their experiences and circumstances are each unique, and as far as I could tell it worked completely smoothly in my game, which is an impressive bit of coding. So the metaphorical resonance takes some of the sting out of the exhausting gameplay, and the author also provides some support for the maze-averse player through use of an exit-listing status bar that highlights places you haven’t been yet (the ABOUT text also recommends mapping, which would make things much easier – I didn’t, to my regret).
Escape isn’t too difficult, though I’m embarrassed to admit it took me longer than it should have since I failed to notice an important detail (in my defense, there are a lot of random events and atmospheric text that fires, meaning my eyes were starting to skip over some of the words by halfway through). But there are also a few optional puzzles that help flesh out the experience and deepen the metaphor. Many of them are pretty intuitive things you’re likely to try anyway, but once again, the author’s provided some assistance in the form of a STATS command that tracks your progress.
All told I found You May Not Escape a smart, well-designed experience. Personally it was more intellectually than emotionally engaging, since the allegory is fairly dry – I got a deep sense of the protagonist’s discomfort, but since the protagonist isn’t characterized in any real way, and there are no other people that they have a relationship with, their suffering isn’t especially barbed. But I think that’s a reasonable authorial choice, and in some way may be a comment on the stereotypical right brain/left brain split between choice-based and parser games (increasingly inaccurate as the division of IF into those two houses is becoming).
As flagged above, the other thing that didn’t fully work for me is the ending, and what it seems to be saying – but to explain this, I’ll have to back up to the beginning. So the person who meets you upon your entry into the maze is one John Everyman, who says he’s there to answer your questions and advocate for you with the people outside to eventually make your lot in life slightly easier. He’s not especially helpful or sympathetic though, growing truculent through the course of your conversation and eventually berating you for “alienat[ing] your potential allies.” Similarly, among the social-media-style messages you’re bombarded with along the way, is this one “Have you considered voting? If we get more of a majority in six months, maybe we can demolish a few of the hallways.” Suffice to say the game seems intensely skeptical of political solutions to the problems it allegorizes.
So if politics and voting aren’t the answer, what is? Here I’ll shift over to spoiler territory.
(Spoiler - click to show)When you get to the gate, you’ll see that it boasts an inscription: “AND IN THE END, THEY FOUND THEMSELVES RETURNED TO THE BEGINNING.” And sure enough, if you wend your way back through the maze, you find that Everyman has skedaddled, but also that there’s now a sledgehammer waiting for you, with which you can simply batter down the gate. As with most metaphors, this is subject to several readings, but one of the most straightforward is that it’s about returning to oneself, gathering one’s strength, and then simply refusing to be bound by the limits society imposes.
That’s an empowering enough message, but also kind of unrealistic and maybe in its own way not dissimilar to some of the annoying “just try harder” messages you seem ticking across the screens? I’m probably biased because my day job involves public policy, but at least in American society it sure does seem to me that there are a whole host of places where the lives of the most vulnerable can be meaningfully improved – maybe even only be meaningfully improved, at least for now – by voting, gathering coalitions of friends who can sometimes be kinda flaky, and at least starting out by making awful things like 15% less awful, in order to get to the place where true transformative change becomes possible. This is not a very inspiring view of the world, I admit! And far be it from me to lecture folks far more directly impacted by oppression on what their strategy for social change should look like, much less how they express themselves through art. But it seems to me this alternative has something to offer folks who can’t find a sledgehammer inside themselves, or find that in battering against the walls that surround them, they’re the ones who start to give.
Okay, back from spoiler-town. I’ll wrap up by saying that just because I didn’t find the game’s suggested resolution of the dilemmas it raises especially compelling, that didn’t undercut the effectiveness with which it poses said dilemmas. You May Not Escape is a smart game that knows how to weave its themes into its gameplay and its themes into its gameplay, which is a rare thing and well worth celebrating.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Just a Maze, except, well, it clearly isn't, December 13, 2022I like to draw a distinction between things that make you think and things that let you think. YMNE falls into the second category, which is the better and less forcing of the two. When prepping this review for IFDB, I kept writing down stuff on the side, ways to look at things from my own life, stuff worth noting that didn't fit into this review. This happens maybe once or twice per IFComp entry. Last year there was The Best Man. YMNE goes down a different road: instead of alienation from a group of friends, it's from society. These things can get horribly didactic horribly fast, perhaps with too much detail and preaching. YMNE has neither. It deals, at least in part, with the powers that be (TPTB) and how they are unfair. And it helped me accept that unfairness in ways a Wellness Guru (TM) never could.
Strictly speaking, it's just a maze game where you need to escape, without a ton of detail. The maze has clues that taunt you or give trivial help, and it's not clear which one's worse. It's not a very big maze, either, and you have a few side quests where you can do something for the souls of people at a cemetery. Your grave is there, too. The maze could be a metaphor for any number of things. The most obvious one is poverty--a jukebox plays a song about a tramp not welcome anywhere. Rain comes down and gets heavier. But I think it could be any sort of Not Being Normal, with the obvious big subjects (gender identity, sexuality, race) and others from something minor like social awkwardness to perhaps autism. Perhaps it is anything that makes you feel isolated, stuff that people who haven't had it don't understand. Mapping the maze isn't the main challenge, here. The author asked that players not spoil the mazes with maps, and I think that may extend in spirit to some details as well. But I'll say this--it's worth working your way through the map. The room descriptions alone help you more than the LCD displays that give encouragement, concrete or otherwise. And with what was there, I realized I felt sort of grateful that there weren't any dead ends with YOU HAVE DIED or a secret police force tackling me. I realized I had a sort of low-level Stockholm Syndrome thing going on there, which is impressive.
This makes for seemingly not much to do in a straightforward game. But YMNE isn't intended to be a game. It doesn't have many characters, either, or a ton of scenery. There's a man at the start, false-cheery and trying to help you, until you ask some obvious questions. You have security cameras you can destroy and park benches o rest at, though this is discouraged. Once I did so, I felt glad I'd snuck something by TPTB, whoever they were, but this soon passed. The ubiquitous LCD displays filled in so much more for me. They mirrored the double meanings of the game title itself: "You may not escape!" could be an expression of fear and concern for the poor player. Or it could be a stronger admonition that you don't have a right to, or we'd prefer if you didn't, because you don't really fit in there.
The double tone of the messages, though? Some give factually wrong information about the maze ahead, and some get it right, but it doesn't help you, because if you've mapped, there's a dead end ahead. Sometimes there's a useless "you can do it!" Other times, a message to kill yourself. My favorite one is "You should know that I donated to CAM two years ago? That's the Council Against Mazes. They've got a lot of big things coming up." This may've been my favorite line in IFComp--it's unclear whether the speaker wants to help or just wants to be seen as a help, but either way, well, they just don't get it--in the best case!
Having those contradicting messages from the LCD display made me think of some relatively unpleasant parts of my past, where people gave contradicting advice that I was apparently supposed to sort out on my own. And so I went into the weeds with other advice the LCD displays could've given, if TPTB (who may have hard or soft power) had been bothered. I suspect the author has thought about this a lot and wants us to think up our own. I was left with reminders of being told 1) I have no common sense and 2) I'm smart enough to work things out. These may not have come from the same people, or from very many people, but they certainly came from the loudest people, the sort that would think, say, a "motivational" message on an LCD screen would get people going, even though they expected much more for their own routine.
Perhaps the biggest contradictions: I should be glad the maze-square isn't bigger, since it would waste more of my time. But perhaps I should be glad the maze-square isn't smaller, as then I would feel no accomplishment getting out. Perhaps I should be glad things are colorless in the game, because that won't distract me from getting out of the maze, but at the same time, what kind of person am I that I would actually enjoy a colorless world? And the walls--a discussion of YMNE related how tall they were. I realized that TPTB could say, well, if you can't see over the walls, well, isn't it nice you're not being made jealous of the "real" world? And if you can, isn't it nice to have that motivation to get out? That sort of thing. I felt discarded, and apparently, I was smart enough to justify some pretty awful behavior from TPTB, but not enough to justify my own being-who-I-was.
For me there was also the specter of people trying to play both sides of the coin with my own experiences--whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, etc. It sort of reminded me how some people appreciate blues music but will be danged if they'll listen to, well, your own personal problems, no offense. "Hey! We haven't gotten to see the neat things you have!" while having their own things they show off for social status. Or people who've told me I should be so social also want me to understand why they're jealous of the rich internal life I have–and they never, well, quite get it.
And there was also the memory of how I once loved mazes, drawing them, trading them (sadly too rarely) and eventually realizing that no matter how different they look, they're all the same. I remembered a maze book my parents bought when I was young, and I wrote the path through in marker, and my parents told me not to get through it too quickly. Years later I found I'd never gotten to a few. The magic was gone. I no longer needed to feel competent getting through mazes. And, of course, mazes can be generated algorithmically now. But YMNE, unlike games with a maze popped in the middle, or even one that subverts it cleverly, reminded me of this, and of how solving a maze-book made me feel like I was working through something, and then I enjoyed playing RPGs where I might get lost but I knew I'd get through, and somewhere along the line, knowing there was an exit and I had experience became "big deal, anyone can do it with perseverance." So perhaps there's an angle of, we get certain shackles sluffed off on us, and we don't realize they're shackles until it's too late, and we can't get them off, and by then "helpful" people may say "I thought you liked that" or "Why didn't you say so earlier?"
Even escaping was unsettling. Maybe not so much for the final bit (it reminded me of the end of a Robert Cormier book, and I like Robert Cormier a lot) and I wondered if I'd really earned any feeling of accomplishment, because really, I'd seen this sort of thing before. I suppose one could feel guilty about going through too quickly and ignoring the graves, or maybe taking care of the graves and saying, well, I just did that to feel good. Did I really deserve to move on and pay my dues? Was I downplaying people who might be in a bigger maze than me? Was it silly to look through the dead ends, or was it selfish and over-expedient to avoid them? That all is survivor's guilt, pretty impressively captured by a relatively short game.
Other things happened maybe by accident, too, so they might not happen to you, but I imagine they happen stochastically and enough for people to say aha, this is important. I failed to do something the second time that worked the first. So I felt as though I'd slid, even though it was really more just because two items were close by the first time and I got lucky. Chance plays a big part--and we can beat ourselves up if it's against us, or puff ourselves up if it's not.
But replaying, I immediately pictured the LCDs with new announcements about how this doesn't really count and I already had advance knowledge, and that's just a bit unfair, isn't it? And shouldn't I have been observant enough to pick up on things the first time? Another conflict was between "oh you're not going to go back to replay this, you're going to forget and get lazy" and "oh you're using the mazes as a buffer to avoid IFComp entries that might challenge you more." Another thing I noticed on replay: (Spoiler - click to show)The path through is randomized, an impressive bit of coding in Inform 7, which gave me the image of many people having their own mazes, similar but different, and of course being alone and maybe even being prone to arguing over whose was tougher once they got out. I didn't decorate the graves the first time, and I almost had a "why should I help these people? I know how to get out" moment. But I did, out of duty, grumbling as I put the wrong thing in the wrong grave once or twice. In essence, I'd become like TPTB writing stuff for the LCD displays. Do what I do, figure what each person stands for, and move on. And I couldn't shake "you used to love mazes as a kid, when'd you get spoiled" versus "don't you want a more profound challenge than a maze? You're more than smart enough, you know."
Again with the being hit from both sides and paralyzed--and the more I played through, the more not-zen-koans came up. Sometimes they come from legitimate sources, and sometimes they're from trolls past or present, and sometimes they're stuff I thought, inspired by unpleasant people, where I'm vaguely glad at least they didn't hit me with them. These thought experiments are part of being human, and it's never clear how much you should turn them over before moving on.
YMNE doesn't hit you directly with them, but it certainly sets the stage with John Everyman at the start and the unhelpful LCD messages. We need to face that this trolling from both sides is there, and it hurts, and the more we can face, the better, but too much at once is crushing. YMNE provided a buffer for me to write down my complaints and observations abstractly. So I think it was more constructive for me than larger-scale horror games were. It's not so much the physical horror as the anticipation of horror and being lost. For me it was about working through contradictions, or trying to, for me. I wondered constantly if I was reading too much, or too little, into it. But it was an experience I'm glad I had, and I played it a few times while I wasn't quite up to reviewing the new IFComp game. The thoughts dribbled in.
So I got a lot out of YMNE. And ironically, for how boxed-in your character is, YNME let me think very freely about Stuff In General. I half expected an LCD message at the end saying "See? The struggles we put you through were worth it!" Or, perhaps, "You may think you got the point, but trust me, you didn't." Perhaps with dueling LCDs insulting me for being too dumb or too lazy to REALLY figure it out. YMNE may be a catalyst for recognizing this sort of thing in the future, not as a paranoid fantasy, but as a way to more fully accepting that things aren't fair, paved with rueful humor. It's not easy to learn and re-learn that, instead of a conspiracy of people making you miserable, there are enough people who don't care in different ways to sure make it seem that way. I value anything that helps me reflect productively on these matters, as YMNE did.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Well I Did!, November 27, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Yeah, it’s a maze (maybe procedurally generated?). A very thin dystopia skin on top of a maze. It’s a fair play maze, it graphed on graph paper exactly as you’d expect. Along the way, there is NPC interaction, (limited), items to pick up, a few unique scenery or locations and many more repeated ones, a series of heckling message scroll boards to read. Other than the clear motivation to escape the maze, there wasn’t much in the way of guidance or story. Intellectually, I think I kind of liked that about it. There was stuff, samey rooms, text to read but it was all ancillary to just getting out. If you did more with the stuff there, great. If not, just fine too.
I got the sense that maybe there were a few second level puzzles to suss out, particularly with the message boards. My end stats showed there was at least one big thing I could have accomplished before escaping but didn’t. In fact it showed a whole series of scores, some of which I achieved others I did not. Even the ones I achieved, it was fully without prompting by the game. I just did them, then turns out there was a score involved. That was kind of subversively fun, too. But all that fun was cold, meta disassociated fun. Emotionally there was nothing, presumedly deliberately so.
Without a story, humor or character hook of any kind, you’re really just wandering around, drawing on graph paper, and picking up minimally rendered items to no clear end. Yeah I played with some items just for fun, and game did enable me to do so to its credit, but it was just killing time. My perverse perseverance pushed me through to the end, but if at any time the game crashed I could have just shrugged and not restarted. Only one bug, error message “runtime error p50, empty menu list” I believe, but it didn’t stop the game. Or break any mimesis or even jar the experience. Just kept walking and mapping.
This was really a poster child for Mechanical execution. There is a place for this of course. Soduko still has its fans, picture puzzles relax millions of folks. Find-a-words, pencil mazes, all of that. A solid implementation in that category if that’s for you.
Played: 10/9/22
Playtime: 1.25hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A procedurally generated maze with some symbolic elements, October 24, 2022I really enjoyed Charm Cochrans previous game, and I was surprised at how different this was compared to that. That one was a religious-themed Twine game with good graphics and lush descriptions. This is a stripped-down parser maze.
It's well-implemented and runs smoothly. You are met at the beginning by a man who introduces himself to you and explains the maze. You then go through it.
While it seems hideously complex at first, the vast majority of the maze rooms have only one entrance and one exit. If mapping, it's only really necessary to write down the rooms with three exits, which are rare.
There are several layers of meaning in the game, from the base Inform implementation level (with little meaning in itself), to the maze itself, to the objects in the maze (like the lizard you can follow or string you can leave behind you), to the messages from Everyman and the LED tickers, to clear political statements that are plain and not symbolic (especially (Spoiler - click to show)the gravestones describing people who died from being denied an abortion for a non-viable pregnancy or who died without anyone using their real chosen name).
Overall, I enjoy surreal games and well-implemented games. I thought that a lot of the messages were delivered well, and if it is designed as a way to feel the frustration of being a marginalized person in a white male cishet-dominated world, I think it demonstrates it very well (also the frustration of caring about the climate or similar issues and getting a lot of promises that don't get acted on). But the main gameplay loop was not one that I enjoyed; a frustration simulator is still frustrating; a frustration parody is still frustrating; a metaphor for imprisonment through frustration is still frustrating.
But given that the game seems designed to incur those feelings, I can only conclude that the author has succeeded. Given that they've so far made an excellent Twine game and an very well-coded parser game, I can only expect that his next game will be brilliant.
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