Escape the Wumpus, by Vitalii Blinov
It’s easy to accuse IF of being a past-obsessed medium: much as the scene has evolved over the decades, to a certain degree we exist in the long shadow of mass-market successes of the 80s (Infocom and Choose Your Own Adventure looming perhaps largest), and practically from the beginning we’ve been commenting on what came before. The obvious, correct rebuttal is that this is an age dominated by remakes, reboots, and legacy sequels, so why should IF be so different? But “everyone else is doing it” concedes the point; as your mom always said, if everyone else was jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?
All of which is to say that Escape the Wumpus, while a reasonably fun time on its own terms, didn’t truly justify its link to OG maybe-IF Hunt the Wumpus. The original is a seminal game of the 1970s, laying out a very specific gameplay paradigm for hide-and-seek as you navigate around a complex maze (famously laid out along the edges of a dodecahedron) and try to get the jump on the eponymous monster. Heck, it’s so seminal that it even has a seminal homage-game, Andrew Plotkin’s Hunter, in Darkness which sticks with the same overall setup but interrogates how an embodied player avatar and evocate prose would change the clinical math puzzle.
So to my mind making a new Wumpus game is a challenging proposition: there’s a high bar to clear, and also, the raw material (geometrically-precise maze, omnipotent monster) isn’t necessarily super compelling on its own. It’s both good and bad, then, that it doesn’t feel like Escape the Wumpus is trying very hard to link itself to this ongoing mythology. Rather than trying to track down and kill the monster, here you’re just trying to get out of the maze before it finds and devours you – but actually, you very much need to do that because this time out the Wumpus is entirely static, just hanging out in a single room and not pursuing you at all. The dodecahedron is correctly set up, so the navigation challenge is familiar, but the gameplay is a straightforward choice-based affair, with simple puzzles (locks, fetch-quests, etc.) scattered about the nodes. You do need to contend with gravity, since some connections leave you plummeting to the ground of a particular cavern, and many of the puzzles are a bit oblique, but in general, you mostly just need to take notes about which nodes connect to which other ones, and which still have an outstanding barrier to resolve, and you can just jog through the maze in a regular pattern, unlocking new doors and getting new items as you go.
There’s an entertainingly offbeat vibe to many of the specifics; the writing isn’t afraid to linger on odd details, presenting totally off-the-wall situations with a minimum of fuss or worldbuilding, and I liked the counterintuitive way the shiny key allows you to progress (it doesn’t unlock a door), but all this does mean that a combination of unclear prose and surprising mechanics often left me unclear of what I should be doing or where I should be going, leading me to run the aforementioned laps instead. Like, this is an engaging piece of writing, but I at least find it hard to picture what’s being described:
The opposite side of the room has another buttoned compartment, almost hidden with a large body of a stone creature. One of its wings covers the creature as a fluffy blanket, and another curtains the door leading to the next room. The creature seemingly sleeping wakes up a bit and tells me: “Hello, little stranger!”
This trend reached its nadir in the final puzzle, which required me to consult the walkthrough – turns out you need to attempt an action that leads to failure twice more in order to progress, which isn’t an approach that’s totally verboten but still one that often leaves me frustrated. Doing so allows you to escape, having never interacted with the Wumpus at all, which again contributes to my sense that this is a game that could have worked equally well on cartesian coordinates with no Wumpus at all. Admittedly, I didn’t fully explore a couple of rooms, making me wonder whether there’s a “true ending” that comments more directly on its inspiration. But given the experience I actually had, I think I would have preferred that non-Wumpus version, as the overhang of expectations (and, I admit, slight annoyance at nostalgia-baiting) didn’t do much to enhance my enjoyment of what’s otherwise a fun enough fantasy adventure.