Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights

There’s not much to say about Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights – as its charmingly awkward, late-period-Planet-of-the-Apes-sequel-ish title suggests, this is an author’s first parser game set in a generic deserted dungeon that doesn’t do more or less than you’d imagine it would. After playing the first couple of rooms I thought to myself that the prose was cleaner than I’d expected, and then immediately ran into a series of capitalization errors and an its/it’s typo soon thereafter. There’s a little bit of spooky atmosphere conjured by a statue of the eponymous knights that conspicuously doesn’t reveal what, if anything, is under their armor, which is undercut by all the rest of the tomb’s décor consisting of variations of that one statue (well, except for the parts that are skulls or coffins, both generic). There’s a gimmickless maze, but it’s basically fine; of course there’s no plot to speak of but that’s as much a relief as a negative. When playing online there’s a noticeable lag (there’s no local download option), the parser’s a bit finicky, and I couldn’t get the transcript to work, but this is a Quest game so it’s hard to hold all of that against the author.

It’s understandable why you’d take this kind of approach for your initial foray into writing a text adventure: the simple, sturdy setting and gameplay make it maximally likely that you’ll be able to complete the hardest step of the game design process, which is to say, finishing something. But it also puts a ceiling on what you can achieve – even if all the little niggles I mentioned above had been resolved, so that rather than dichotomies each sentence was unalloyed praise, it’d still be faint praise indeed. It’s in theory possible to implement this generic scenario with such quality that it’s nonetheless memorable, I suppose – as I write this, I’m recalling a game from maybe a couple years back that had a similar start-at-the-bottom-of-the-dungeon setup and was also a first-time effort, but had some interesting ornamentation and dressed up the puzzles fairly well? Ah yes, The Hidden King’s Tomb: but the fact that I had to struggle to come up with the name (this took a solid ten minutes of scrolling through my old reviews to find), and that it turns out I rated it only a 2 out of 5, perhaps makes this less of an exception than I thought when I began this anecdote.

Sadly, I doubt Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights will have much more staying power – besides the funny-ish title, my main takeaway is that I continue to really struggle with even simple puzzles in games with two-word parsers where USE is the main action you’re meant to use. Still, this is a first game, and it is entered into the Back Garden, so it’s probably unfair to set expectations too high. I’ll wrap up by paraphrasing what I said in that Hidden King’s Tomb review: this isn’t the kind of first game that’d be of much interest to anyone but the author, but it is the kind of first game that the author might have had to write in order to write a much better, much more interesting second game – and I look forward to playing that second game.