Playing Escape the Gloomer

[Captain Tammo]

Hey all!

I got myself a copy and started playing. I like to take my sweet time with games; I'm on chapter 6 right now and it's been worth it so far! I've tried a couple text adventures before and have never had a bad experience with them. They give creators a bit of flexibility in the narrative in that you don't actually have to program in all these crazy things, you can just write it in and add some artwork. And to me there's a certain charm in that which isn't necessarily present in your traditional processor-hungry game library. Not to mention text adventures usually have some easter eggs. There's something especially cool about them when you find them in a text adventure, and there are a few here to discover

So have any of you guys given it a shot yet? Any questions about it that you want to ask if you're thinking about buying it? Just want to say hi?

[James Gryphon]

I've been fond of the text adventure scene (as anyone who played "The Arena II" could probably guess) for quite some time, so I was interested to see what this one would turn out like. It seemed like a natural genre, since text adventures tend to be a slower pace, and the world is based on a book series.

I finished EtG the other day. All in all, I'm pretty happy with it.

Text adventures have come a long way since the 80s in design, and this one incorporates a lot of the best of the modern-day genre. The game always being winnable is taken for granted these days, and this has an interesting way to balance out risky and dangerous situations in the game

Spoiler

, turning them into something of an environmental obstacle, not something that can actually kill your character

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. The lack of compass orientations, at one point a key feature of most text adventure games, is more than made up for by the emphasis on locations and their positions relative to each other. It was a major breakthrough for me (emotionally) when I realized that I could revisit locations in one step, instead of having to repeatedly type in the same commands to go from one room to another.

The puzzles are tricky, but basically fair. A lot of adventure games (especially the infamous pirate-centered ones from a certain mostly defunct game company known for its association with Star Wars) have puzzles that are really very arbitrary and involve unintuitive leaps of logic, or reading the author's mind, or just clicking every item in your inventory on everything until something takes. Here, though, while I didn't figure out every puzzle on my own (it was probably about 60/40, with the help of the excellent hints system), there aren't any that I could say were unfair or unrealistic, that I shouldn't have been able to (eventually) figure out on my own. What's more, they often seemed obvious in retrospect, the sign of a good puzzle -- making the user think "why didn't I think of that," not "there's no way I ever would have gotten that". That said, I did have some trouble at points:

Spoiler

In particular, I remember having a hard time grasping the purpose of the beehive, since I hadn't gotten to the rusty gates at the time I was dealing with it. The best thing I could think of to do with it was to try to use the bees as a weapon against Gloomer, which didn't work too well. It was pretty obvious once I got to the gates and found out they were off, but before then, I didn't know what it was for. The knot-tying puzzle was obvious in retrospect, but I remember at the time not having a clue and trying to stick it to the ring with honey.

Also, the stream above the sulfur cave turned out to be a hilariously, disproportionately time-taking obstacle. For some reason I perceived it as being comparable to the abyss, and kept trying to find ways to bridge it. I think I rolled my eyes a bit when it turned out I could have just jumped over it all along. I guess I didn't read its description carefully enough -- chalk up another one for detail.

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It's interesting to note how traditional game design principles are incorporated seamlessly into the game; you get practice with each 'mechanic' as you go, so that when you get to a more important moment in the game, you might think, 'oh, maybe I should try this, like before'. With a few rare exceptions, the caverns are filled with smoke from all of Chekhov's arsenal. The cyclical nature of the locations works well with this, and is intuitively pleasing as you find new depth in each room and get to experience them in changing ways as the plot develops. The ending is rather reminiscent of Plotkin's "Hunter, in Darkness", appropriate considering the cavern theme.

The writing and setting, and use of the setting, is quality overall and fits in pretty well with the Redwall world, not an easy thing to do when the source material is considered to be one of the best books in the series.

Spoiler

There are points that don't work out strictly based on what we would think from the established 'canon', but they're reasonably well explained and believable. The biggest surprise, aside from Gloomer's survival, for me would probably be the big time jump in the middle of the story. It neatly explains why we never heard about this before -- he was stuck underground so long that by the time he got out, the point of the quest was moot.

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If I had significant complaints, it'd be that there are still a few glitches and weak areas in the game's technical side. There was one part where using the quick location-jump feature didn't reset the state of illumination, so I was 'blind and in the darkness' while I stood behind the glowing waterfall. For some reason, the text box seems to visually flicker and not be 100% reliable at accepting input, which can be a little annoying. I don't know if there's a way to turn on verbose scene descriptions upon entering any room, but it's sometimes irritating to walk into a place and not see what's going on there without 'looking' everything. The syntax reader is pretty good, but it can be a bit inflexible and clueless at times. If the scene description mentions something, it seems a bit odd when the syntax immediately says 'no clue what you're talking about, bro' when you put it in the text box. Still, at least it often gives you automatic feedback, which is a step up from the bad old days when you wasted a lot of valuable inputs playing 'guess the verb' or 'how are you allowed to use this object'. That still happens here sometimes, but not as often as it could, which is progress.

All in all, it's a very enjoyable text adventure. Even though I got to the end, I don't think I've found everything there is to see in the game yet, and I expect I'll be going back to see what I missed.

[Mherrera]

James,

I'm the Community Manager for Clopas, the developers of Lost Legends or Redwall: Escape the Gloomer. We're really delighted you enjoyed the game (Scott in particular was really touched by your words). You've said some really nice things in your post above and we were wondering a few things. First, can we quote you? Second, how would you feel about writing a review on the Steam page?

Of course, if you have any other thoughts or questions, I'd be happy to answer them here, or you can contact us directly at feedback@clopas.net

And, if you want, I'd love to pick your brain more about various aspects of the game.

[James Gryphon]

Hi,
Y'all are definitely free to take anything from my reviews that you find useful. The game series has every indication of being the future of the Redwall franchise, so it's important to do whatever we can to help them succeed. I thought of doing a Steam review, before settling temporarily to make the rather rambling post up above; if you think it's good, though, I'll refine my thoughts and words and certainly try to get one up reasonably quickly.

If you have any questions or would like feedback about things, feel free to ask, and I'll try to help out as much as I can; it's an honor to be on the radar of the people behind the game.

[Mherrera]

James,

The honor is ours. We make the games for fans like yourself. 

Both Scott and I thought the post was good (He was bragging about it to the publishers and the rest of the team). Feel free to clean it up as you want and post it to the User Reviews on the Steam Store page.

As for further questions, do you mind if we communicate further via email? You can contact me at feedback@clopas.net