Escape the Pale

A story I am astonished to discover I haven’t yet related in an IF review is the time I married my twin sister – she was wearing my mother’s wedding dress, it was a Freudian nightmare. And did I mention I was twelve? Such are the wages of having gone to a small elementary school, where the limited number of students meant that the teachers doing the casting for the eighth-grade production of Fiddler on the Roof wound up making some perverse choices. Despite this slight embarrassment, I really enjoyed the play, and wound up renting the movie version a bunch of times. I was kind of a rigid kid, so beyond the catchy tunes there was something especially appealing about the story of a shtetl milkman who discovers exactly how far he can, and can’t, bend as his daughters begin pairing off. The other thing that made it especially compelling was the ending: unlike the stereotypically happy closings of much musical theater, Fiddler’s last scene has everyone fleeing the village because the Tsar has decided to seize their land and give it to Christians, with a pogrom coming for anyone foolhardy enough to stay.

This is about the moment where Escape the Pale picks up; despite a few in-jokey references, it’s not of course a direct sequel, but the setup has you dusting yourself off after being ejected from your ancestral home, forced to hustle around an economic simulation of Eastern Europe in hopes of accumulating enough money to reach the hopefully-more-than-temporary safety of Istanbul, Austria, or America. That’s a potentially rich premise, but the operative aesthetic here is very stripped-down, from the minimal narrative to the simple gameplay to the bare-bones presentation (we’re talking black-text-on-a-white-background-with-numbered-menus). There are some neatly-designed places where the mechanics create specific story beats in what’s otherwise an open-ended simulation, but despite the impassioned author’s note at the end, I’m not sure there’s enough meat on these bones for the game to make a significant impact on anyone already familiar with the basics of the history.

Let’s start with the economy, since that’s what you spend the great majority of your time in Escape the Pale engaging with. The basic gameplay loop involves arriving at a city, selling any of your wares you might be carrying, deciding whether to buy the single good that city produces (after reviewing a table with the rumored prices of said good in the region’s dozen other cities), and then paying a small amount of money to travel to one of the 2-5 other cities you can reach from where you’re at. Every once in a while a random event will occur – maybe a customs official will ask for a bribe, or your cousin will run afoul of the authorities, they’re never anything positive – and on your first playthrough it’s worth keeping a spreadsheet to track which cities connect to which other ones, and where you can take a train to Vienna or a boat to New York, but the simulation isn’t really robust enough to support anything but the most basic strategy: prices do fluctuate a bit from what the rumors say, but with travel costs imposing friction and no ability to check on the sale price of your goods once you arrive in a new city, the only real strategy appears to be spot-checking whether the good on sale in a city seems to have a good profit margin in any of the places you can reach in one or two hops, then filling your cart with as much as you can afford and hoping you get lucky.

Standing in the way of simple accumulation are a half dozen or so narrative set-pieces, some of which are purely for flavor while others shift the rules of the game. They all play out in only a few bottom-lined sentences, but since they almost all depict the casual inhumanity with which the region’s governments treat Jews, some of them can be chilling if you’ve got the imagination to fill in the gaps. The most impactful is running across some distant family members who beg you to take a young cousin with you when you leave for someplace safer; carrying her around increases your travel costs, and also increases the dangers some of the events pose.

There are other places where the mechanics shape the narrative in a particular way, and again, most of these are unpleasant and unfair. The most galling of these is the way that the price tables always show that the best resale value for any item can always be found in Bucharest. If you do manage to figure out how to travel through the node-web to reach it, though, joke is on you: your papers don’t allow you to enter Romania, so you get an automatic game over (there’s no save function, of course). Similarly, to get to America you need to leave from Vilno, but you can almost never get a good value for your goods there, and if you try to carry in a lot of cash, a corrupt official will invariably steal half of your money, so you’d better make sure you have more than you need for your ticket – although, not too much, because if you ever accumulate an especially significant nest egg the game also arbitrarily imposes a bad end. This obviously helps reinforce the ways that Jews were unjustly victimized, but the blunt approach here risks making it feel like the author, rather than the governments, is the one out to get you.

Ironically then, the part of the game that evoked the greatest feelings in me was the author’s postscript, which has two main themes: first, the way that this game, alone among others, seemed to create controversy among the circle of friends and family to whom the author habitually circulated them, and second, their decision to leave their position at a university and leave the U.S. There’s very little that’s stated directly, but reading between the lines, I’m guessing that the controversy had to do with Israel’s genocide in Gaza – there’s a sentence in one of the endings about how the Jews suffer without a homeland, which is an understandable statement to articulate in 1905 but lands differently in the context of 2025 – and that leaving the country has something to do with Trump’s authoritarianism and targeting of academics (apropos of the author, it’s worth noting that the pseudonym recalls Nabokov’s novel Pnin, about a Russian émigré academic who’s wound up teaching in the US after fleeing the Russian revolution and losing a Jewish lover to the camps).

This is clearly a significant game to the author, but I found this cri de coeur frustratingly vague given how reticent Escape the Pale is to say beyond pointing out the ways the Jews have suffered – fleshing it out to make clear what modern echoes the author would certainly have risked pissing people off, but shorn of the passion animating something like Fiddler, the game doesn’t amount to much more than an arid gesture at some heart-rending history.