You May Not Escape! (Charm Cochran)
Played on: 2nd October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran in Windows Git
How long I spent: 90 minutes to find two endings and solve most puzzles
This is a parser puzzle game made in Inform 7. The game is one big maze, and your challenge is to escape it. As the tag “parable” on the IFComp might tell you, though, there’s a bit more to it than that. An opening conversation with a politician gives you a brief backstory, as he tells you that you have to solve a maze now, and angrily rebuffs any questions as to why. It quickly becomes apparent that the title You May Not Escape! is not a warning, but an admonishment.
I don’t want to talk about the maze itself in too much detail. The author is trying to preserve a sense of mystery and of, well, being lost – they’ve requested in the game’s ABOUT response that nobody share any maps they make – and I want to respect that. At the same time, I do kinda have to talk about the maze, since it is the game. So, as generally as possible, without spoiling any specific puzzles or revealing any specific locations:
I have a feeling that YMNE’s maze is procedurally generated and different for each player. (I just checked this, and yes, the opening room I get when I open the game now has a different exit than in my main playthrough.) My maze had kind of a wiggly layout without many forks, and certain key locations were placed inconveniently far from each other, and I think a hand-designed maze would have been smoother to play through. I’m not the biggest fan of procedural generation, and in gameplay terms I didn’t really like the maze.
But I do recognise why the maze had to be procedural. It’s not just a maze, after all. LED signs throughout the maze display largely patronising, unhelpful or even abusive messages. And you never get a satisfactory answer for why the maze should exist – you’re in the maze because a politician says you should be and that’s that. The maze is a parable for how just being a certain kind of person – that is, not male, not white, etc. – can place overwhelming systemic obstacles in your way throughout your life. YMNE seems to examine this particularly in terms of misogyny (a lot of the LED messages sound eerily like the way gamers tweet at women they hate), but a certain key location alludes to transphobia and anti-Semitism too.
The randomised maze, then, is an acknowledgement that, although the broad challenges of systemic oppression are the same, the specific lived experiences will be uniquely challenging for everyone. This is a nuanced and important point, and I can see that it would be lost with one hand-designed maze for everyone. For the same reason, I understand that there should be a certain amount of friction in navigating the maze, since if it’s too easy, it’s not a very convincing parable for navigating systemic oppression. Still, though, I think the long winding passages are more time-consuming than difficult, and if I had my druthers I’d try to nudge the maze-generation to produce more forks and fewer lengthy passages. (If that’s possible. I’ve never made a maze generator. It probably isn’t easy.)
Pretty much everything else is on point. There’s some excellent attention to detail throughout YMNE. Navigating the maze is made easier with the much-appreciated exit listing in the header. And there are detailed responses and consequences to trying to use certain items in interesting ways. There are a couple of oversights too – “turn on” should work as a synonym for “switch on”, since the words “turn on” are used in the text – but nothing that can’t be cleaned up in a future release should the author want to keep working on it.
The puzzles that I noticed and solved weren’t too hard in themselves, although I spent an embarrassingly long time on the final puzzle failing to put two and two together (I had to pause the IFComp timer and play Splatoon 3 for an hour before my brain got into gear). This final puzzle is satisfying, extending the metaphor of the maze in a hopeful and defiant direction. There are a couple of extra mysteries that I haven’t solved yet, but I’ve done well enough to escape the maze and see a good ending.
You May Not Escape is neat. I liked this game a lot. It’s taking the classic maze trope of interactive fiction and doing something interesting and artistic and thought-provoking with it. And honestly, maybe this is just my brain, but it’s just fun to make a big map of a maze sometimes.