You May Not Escape! by Charm Cochran
You May Not Escape! bills itself as a parable. The exact meaning of this term can be contested, but one usually thinks of a short, relatively straightforward narrative that teaches a lesson through allegory. Classic examples in the Western traditions are the parables told by Jesus, such as the story of the prodigal son, which conveys a lesson about God by telling a story about a human father. Some of the New Testament stories about Jesus can also be considered parables, like the story of the adulterous woman, which teaches us a universal lesson about punishment and forgiveness. Unlike the stories told by Jesus, the stories told about Jesus are not usually classified as parables, since from the point of view of traditional Christianity they are not supposed to be allegorical; but from the point of view of literary analysis, the adulterous woman and the prodigal son clearly belong to the same genre.
How does You May Not Escape! fit in this tradition? The game clearly invites an allegorical reading. To understand a maze as symbolic of the meaningless grind of daily existence is straightforward; when one adds details like the locked exit, the graveyard with victims of oppression, the surveillance cameras and the random messages that sound like typically shallow and unpleasant online interactions, the picture emerges of a tedious, hopeless life lived in a hostile society. To be honest, the game seems to be spreading its nets a little bit too widely – while there may be connections between, say, online hate culture, the surveillance state, and anti-abortion politicians, the game doesn’t do much to connect them. We are supposed to do a lot of the work ourselves, whereas it seems to me that the author of an allegory must at least surprise us with some of the work they do. In the end I took the core allegorical idea to be connected to the song of labour activist Joe Hills (1879-1915) that will resound throughout the labyrinth once you have turned on the jukebox:
This song, which bemoans the fact that the itinerant worker is nowhere accepted as a community member, not even in Heaven, combines neatly with the final image where we break free of the maze by using a large sledgehammer. In fact, I found myself humming The Internationale:
So while there is a clear allegorical component to the game, I hesitate to call it a parable. There is simply not much narrative. Almost all of the game consists of exploring a randomly generated labyrinth. (Mapping is highly recommended. Tip: this is the kind of maze that is mapped most easily by building up a map of the walls on a grid, rather than by drawing a map of interconnected rooms.) I found this quite relaxing, especially because I haven’t been doing a lot of mapping in the IFComp so far. The atmosphere is also well done: everything in our inventory getting wet and dirty was an especially neat touch that sets us apart from the usual impossibly clean adventurer. But as a story there is not much here. Is that a problem? Not necessarily. But I did find the experience to be a bit on the thin side. When we’re going to take a sledgehammer to the injustices of society, I suppose I’d like to have a better idea of what it is that we’re going to destroy and what the results will be like. Or perhaps I just want to hear more of what the author has to tell me.
Implementation was very solid, but I found one semi-bug: the jukebox can be heard based on spatial distance on the grid, but it seems more logical to me if it can be heard based on how many moves in the maze we are away from it. (That is a bit harder to implement, though, so maybe not worth it.)