Despite the popularity of Rogue-like games in earlier decades, randomized or procedurally-generated adventure games are rare in modern interactive fiction. “Randomized escape” is a parser-based horror game in which the protagonist tries to survive in a randomly-generated environment.

Gameplay: Although the idea for the game is a compelling one, its execution is limited and difficult to play through. The setting isn’t an interesting environment to wander around in, and the game lacks details about many of its central ideas and mechanics. Given the strong randomness factor of the game, the only way to proceed is through trial and error, and that becomes tedious quickly. 4/10.

Mechanics: The walkthrough gives a few indications of what items are valuable and how they can be used, but many of the mechanics of the game are opaque. (The download for the game includes its Inform 7 source code, but I haven’t looked through it.) The character’s sanity decreases at various points in the game, triggering hallucinations. 3/10.

Presentation: Grammatical errors, typos, and odd phrases (or mistranslations) occur throughout the game: “I would rather let this newspaper where it lays,” encountering a “pile of cardboxes,” the warning that “You sanity have decrease,” etc. Some of the objects, even ones that aren’t useful to the protagonist, have very detailed descriptions. 3/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You’d like to see source code for adding certain procedurally-generated elements to a game.

Score: 3