Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

By Mark Stahl. Completed on desktop using Gargoyle.

Escape rooms — the real life physical spaces where the players try to solve puzzles to escape — were inspired mostly by the genre of Flash game that popped up in the early 2000s.

The premise of this game is that you’re in a real-life escape room, so what we have is a electronic game inspired by a physical game inspired by an electronic game. Whoa.

This is a meme from a community group about a game named after the meme.

Ever since visiting that escape room in the Tampa area, you’ve become obsessed with real life “escape the room” games. Normally, you would have brought as many friends with you as possible, but no one was available today so you’re going it alone. And now your task begins; to find your way out of “The Wizard’s Rainbow”, as it’s called. Looking at your surroundings, the first thing that you notice is that…

White Room
Everything appears white; the floor, the ceiling, and the walls. There do not appear to be any exits, but you’re not so sure.

You can see a white chair here.

The rooms are roughly as minimalist as the ones in The Richard Mines, but with the important exceptions that

a.) in the fiction of the world — a multi-room “escape room” — the minimalism makes sense

and

b.) the world is still “dense” and each room serves a purpose.

The premise makes the random room layout feel reasonable, and also gives an excuse for the author to pull out the old SEARCH / LOOK UNDER / LOOK BEHIND style verbs. Not everything is coded as solidly as it could be — for instance, I softlocked the game once by putting a blank paper on a table, at which point it existed and didn’t exist at the same time — but I was still able to get to the end without too much trouble.

The ending is a bit of a gag, which suggests to me there wasn’t enough meat to the plot to begin with. You do the escape room alone: a far more compelling game might have had people with you. I realize this makes for a much trickier coding proposition.