Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   Whiterabbit-uk
   Games Guru

   *This game is not suitable for children; it may contain content upsetting or innapropriate*

   Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer (20.1Mb)

   

   Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer was developed by Calunio for RPGMaker.net's 2010 Game Gale competition. It tells the story of a disturbed youth named Verge, who joins a community of torturers called the Dungeoneers. These folks have private dungeons in their homes where they lure strangers into and torture them to near death for the viewing pleasure of an online audience. Their measure of perfection is what they call the "Beautiful Escape", a physical and mental state between life and death that they aim to put their prisoners in, rendering them insane, but just barely alive to escape the dungeon.
   The best part about this game is the narrative. Even before I made my first dungeon, I was drawn into the morbid atmosphere and premise of the game via the initial dialogue between Verge and his love interest, Daily. The script is remarkably well-written and more often than not, sends shivers down my spine with choice of words alone. This is further augmented by the short "dating-sim" sessions that happen before each dungeon in which you seduce your next victim to come home with you. This interaction process allows each victim to become real people with distinct personalities before you extract their screams from them.

   

   The actual gameplay portions take the form of a simple puzzle game in which you lay traps along a linear path that the prisoner will take towards the exit. The physical and mental well-being of the victim are represented by Health and Willpower gauges. If a victim escapes with any of these intact, your game will end. Killing them or totally destroying their will to live results in a mediocre victory - the true aim is to achieve the aforementioned "Beautiful Escape". Each session will be reviewed by fellow dungeoneers on their fictional website. They will rate your session according to whether there was a beautiful escape, whether you have given false hope, and the variety of traps used.

   

   Possibly my only complain about this game was the ambiguous conditions for a Beautiful Escape. After reading the instructions, I naturally aimed for a Beautiful Escape - I left my victims with a wee bit of health and willpower to leave the dungeon with, but was met with a game over. I was puzzled, and only discovered the required levels for both gauges later through trial and error. Maybe a better solution might be to leave explicit marks on the gauges that exhibited threshold amounts required for a Beautiful Escape.

   

   But seriously, this game blew my little mind away. I pushed for that first Beautiful Escape for nearly an hour, but what kept me going was really the narrative, and the nagging desire to know what is going to happen next. I urge you to quickly go over to RMN and take a look at this title now.

   Reference accessed HERE July 2010

   Game play:

   Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer has two distinct gameplay aspects:

   1)..... The first one is similar to a Dating Sim, in which you have to approach strangers on the street and seduce them to go home with you, mainly using dialog choices.

   2)..... The second one is more like a puzzle, and it consists of setting up your dungeon to torture your victims. Your goal at this stage is making your victim leave the dungeon completely shattered psychologically and physically, but still alive. That’s what the Dungeoneers call a Beautiful Escape, and it’s the ultimate goal of the torture sessions. You can also get them killed, get them too depressed to leave the dungeon, or even have them leave healthy enough, but your viewers won’t appreciate your videos as much. It’s all about the delicate balance between too much and not enough.

   Gameplay elements are tempered with lots of dialogs and the resolution of Verge’s love story.

   

   You can check out several reviews of this game HERE

   Download:

   You can download Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer HERE

   ===========================================================================================

   Posted 14 years ago #
2. 

   Anonymous
   Unregistered

   Having just encountered this game and it's disturbing theme, I thought I might add my own review.

   I’m not one to advocate brutality, mutilation or humiliation, but neither would I wish to deprive forum readers of a game that has great graphics and lighting effects - and a particularly horrific storyline. You take your choices and decide for yourself what games to try or play!

   You want to leave your victim just alive and totally insane, by the time they escape your network of traps. Hence the ‘beautiful escape’ - alive but mentally and emotionally/psychologically shattered. Well I’m not a masochist, but there has to be some fun in setting sadistic and devilish traps - at least in a game setting, but remember it is a game setting, not real life. You lose if your victim is barely clinging on to life, or dies trying to escape. The games scenics are reminiscent of ‘Sin City’ and the game has many instances of black humor.

   First you have to lure them into your dungeon, with a dialogue sim first part to the game. This has a character element and you choose who to try to entice into your power and who to inflict ‘torture’ on. Then you set various traps and let them ‘try’ to escape. You hear the victims scream as you torture them. This forms a puzzle element to the second part of the game as to where and what traps to set. Basically the storyline is that you have viewer’s (the Dungeoneers) watching as you entrap then ‘permit’ your victim to escape. But it’s under your conditions, and you have to watch the victim’s health and will-power gauges. The devices are pretty classic as in anything that might make your victims bleed, eg chainsaws, drills, razor blades, and so on. But physically tormenting your victim is not enough, you must also damage them psychologically. To that end, you can strip them (complete with a unique stripped sprite), pretend to drown them, place false doors to lure them into thinking they’re going to escape or assault them. You start by visiting torture supply shop to pick up supplies for your next video/victim. There’s little by way of explanation done and you have to figure out how to use various items and their likely success rate. You have to find combinations of traps that work, and it is likely your first dozen or so victims will speedily escape in good or relatively good physical and mental health! But you will eventually come up with ‘winning’ combinations of traps and persevering, your victims will get weaker and more and more subdued, as they try to escape. There are a series of ingame mini-games set in various locations.

   You can of course over-do the traps and kill the victims/drive them to despair, or under-do things and let them escape relatively healthy and partly unscathed. Neither will get the accolade of the viewers! Though killing the victim is a lesser ‘crime’ than letting them escape relatively well-off physically or mentally. Giving the victim ‘false hope’ may get you extra points from the viewers!

   The maps have been drawn very thoughtfully, and the game is deeply atmospheric from the start. Your reputation as a sadist is poor and you have to ‘redeem’ yourself in the eyes of the viewers by entrapping victims and having a high torture success rate, without actually killing the victims.

   You do need a measure of patience as there are cut scenes that play regardless, and ‘waits’ to continue. Also you move around at a slow walking pace and it isn’t made clear on the map where you can actually go, or which buildings you can enter. You will need to use trial and error in finding your way around.

   The instructions are not overly detailed and you need to note that contraptions with the attribute "sustainable" require you to repeatedly press buttons 1 and 2 on your keyboard to fully utilize their effects.

   You might well find yourself sympathising with the pedestrians and various characters you meet and the victims rather than the game’s main brutal and sadistic character Verge, but that’s not a bad thing now is it? It is difficult, if not well nigh impossible to associate torturing victims to ‘being close to them as a result’. You feel their pain? By seeing their heath and will-power dwindling? - not if you’re in any way a normal person, with normal feelings. The real question is how well this works as a game. It does succeed in being disturbing and having very traumatic moments. That’s if your traps work quite well. Otherwise it’s -Oh dear he’s escaping rather too well. Or oh dash it, killed another one! The macabre is there. We can love it or hate it, take it or leave it, depending on our mood. Perhaps if we’ve had a bad day at the office with the boss, we can vent some of our feelings by imagining the victims to be our worldly bosses!

   It’s a curious game at the very least, and an impressive concept, being nearly first person, but using the 2D RPG GameMaker engine. You might find it repulsive or fascinating. It is certainly different. It is clever and interesting, but disturbing at the same time. Perhaps even brilliant but bizarre! No doubt ‘Saw’ addicts will thrive on this game.

   This isn’t a game for everyone, but if you like the idea in a game of luring then ‘torturing’ victims in a serial way, implied sadism, and the macabre, you might wish to give this game a try. It is a game and it isn’t about role-play, it’s about setting the ‘perfect’ combination of traps, to allow the victim to get away, but ‘scarred’ for life as it were, at least in the game setting.

   It’s a particularly difficult theme to adapt to a game setting and I’ll leave players to decide on how successful it is in evoking this sad and painful, masochistic scenario, and how much it is worth playing or replaying. The accompanying sound and music add to the grim and melancholy and, maybe depressing, atmosphere of the game. The game has a harrowing sense of suffering and harshness to it, but then again, the real world isn’t always the nicest of places! But that’s what the game is all about and you might enjoy trying to ‘obtain’ victims by ‘convincing’ them to join you, then setting up tortuous combinations of traps, while still letting them have a ‘nice flight’ and escape in some sort of manner of speaking!

   It is after all up to you as to how severely the traps operate! And you don’t have to take the game’s theme too seriously. It is in spite of everything, a game, and with cartoon characters!

   **Warning:- this game contains adult themes, and gratuitous violence and is completely unsuitable for younger players, or the psychologically disturbed; or any players who might find the ‘mature theme’ disturbing, or tempt real life replication.**

   Posted 13 years ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.