Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer

Calunio’s entry for Game Gale 2010 is a….er… torture porn game made in RM2k3, in which you…. brutally torture random people.

Okay, FULL DISCLOSURE, I pretty much despise the whole “brutality for the hell of it” fad that became popular in movies a few years back, and I’m going to take a minute to pontificate why. This phenomenon probably started with the film Saw in which a twisted genius trapped individuals in creatively designed and very horrifying death traps in order to teach these people to overcome certain personality flaws. These traps were designed around the person’s individual flaw and an observant viewer can even see how the trap can be overcome if the person is willing to accept and correct their weakness. Those who failed were generally subject to horrifying mutilation. Something about this premise intrigued audiences so Hollywood quickly made a series of copycat films that made no effort to capture the original spirit of this film or what made it good decent somewhat watchable. They were simply filled with sadists inflicting brutal torture on hapless teenagers for no reason at all. These films are often equated to pornography for a reason; they appeal to the lowest, basest part of the audience in a lazy and indulgent manner. That’s my opinion on the matter anyway. After playing this, it is my opinion that, perhaps despite the author's best intentions and efforts, this game has more in common with the latter than the former. Since I pretty much despise this genre I am going to be frank and admit right here up front that while I don't think that was the whole point of this game, there is pretty much no way this bias didn’t carry over into the review of this game.

But hey, that’s not to say this is going to be horrible, right? I’m sure this is going to be a perfectly marvelous game! Just look at those lightning effects! So, let’s put an end to my author tract and get on with this.

Our protagonist, Verge, is a high school librarian who moonlights in Dungeoneering, a world-wide online community of sadists who build dungeons in their basement and lure victims, called “sobbers,” into their clutches in order to cruelly and sadistically torture them. They video tape these torture sessions and then load them onto their website for other dungeoneers to watch, comment on, and review. However, Verge’s dungeoneering skills are considered sub-par and his work is generally lambasted by the community, leading him to be quite bitter and depressed. You are free to interpret this incredibly bleak outlook as commentary on the RM community; the developer certainly does, and the irony of equating “RM Games” with “torture” isn’t lost on me for a second. But Verge is determined to improve his dungeoneering skills in order to impress his friend Daily, whom he is infatuated with. To this end he enters a torture contest (seriously) in hopes of creating the ultimate torture video and winning Daily’s heart. The aftermath of this contest will change Verge’s life forever.


Level Design 2/5
Whoa whoa, why such a mediocre score? Just look at those lighting effects! I certainly am not going to argue that visually the game is quite impressive, but that just isn’t enough to make up for the plethora of bad design choices in this title.

From the very beginning of this short game, the atmosphere is clearly well done and the creator obviously put a lot of thought and effort into the maps. Some have a sort of pseudo 3D effect that looks pretty decent, and there are few enough maps in the game to generally maintain a proper level of detail throughout all of them. The game is full of rips, many from Streets of Rage and even Sim City, which were frowned upon by contest rules but does nothing to diminish their impact. Visually, the game is quite striking. Unfortunately it’s also just about the only good thing I have to say about it.

There are two main mechanics in the game, a sort of dialogue-tree minigame ala a dating Sim, and the torture sessions. I will cover the dating Sim part in the characters section. In the torture sessions, your “sobber” will walk along a linear path in your dungeon and your job is to lay down various types of torture tiles in this game. The game pretty much reaches into the bag of horror clichés and pulls out every single classic; chainsaws, drills, razor blades, anything that can make you bleed is here. But tormenting your victim physically is not enough, you also must damage them psychologically. To that end, you can strip them naked, (complete with a unique naked sprite for every victim in the game, really) pretend to drown them, place false doors to lure them into thinking they’re going to escape, or rape them. Yes, that’s right, you can rape people in this game! This is even accompanied by a minigame I will explain later. Causing sufficient damage to both body and mind will result in what is known as a “beautiful escape,” the ultimate goal of every session. Killing your victim is considered mediocre. Ultimately these sessions don't feel much like torture, so don't let it scare you too much, but there isn't a whole lot to do here that is very interesting, as I will explain later.

When the game begins you are sent off to your torture supply shop to pick up supplies for your next video. Here you play a dialogue tree mini-game with the owner, the responses you give him in this instance determine the traps you can use in your first torture session. (The rape option is a bonus item you can find later. Seriously.) After this sequence, I raced off to claim my first victim, only for them to walk through every single trap and escape the dungeon. Game over.

Whoa, what? How did that happen? I used every trap! I immediately redid this session, doing the dialogue tree with my supplier differently and getting a different batch of supplies. This time, when one of my traps went off, a gauge appeared in the upper corner telling me to mash 1 and 2! This caught me completely off guard and by the time I figured out what I needed to do, the victim had escaped the trap and quickly fled the dungeon, giving me another game over. Turns out with certain traps you can cause extra damage by hitting 1 and 2, but nothing ever forewarned me of this. I later found out this was mentioned in the read me, but there was no in-game explanation. In fact, nothing about the traps, the dialogue trees, the torture videos, or how they are rated is ever explained in the game. A tutorial for fist timers would have been very helpful, and even once I was familiar with the mechanics of the "1 2" minigame I was still not sure if I was doing it right and don’t know what effect it actually had, or what the gauge is actually telling me.

Frustrated, I went back to supplier for a different set of traps. I knew that this guy liked to be flattered, but no matter what combination of traps he gave me I just couldn’t succeed. I tried ten times and could not succeed on even my first victim. If I were not a judge and required to see this game through I definitely would have given up on it here. There are certain combinations of starting equipment that are flatly impossible to win with. Your only recourse is to start over. This is a very serious problem and I suspect it would drive many players to quit. Then again maybe I was just really unlucky. Ten times in a row. But I persevered and after many tries found a combination that worked. Having a high chance of rolling an unwinnable combination of traps right out of the gate really soured the game for me. Fortunately, this very serious flaw was corrected in the latest release so I no longer hold this against it.

Once past this point, all real challenge disappeared as from this point on I was given way more traps for each video than a victim could ever survive. Unless of course you don’t know that a trap can only be used once and head into a session with only three traps remaining. Another game over for you!

The only real challenge at this point is to try to execute a beautiful escape, in which only a sliver of the health and will bars remain, but this is really hard to do without being psychic. Too many traps will kill your target or drive them to despair, too few and you’ll get a game over. I suppose if you practiced you could accomplish it, but that assumes you can stand playing for that long. There is little in the way of technical skill you can use to influence this outcome, only through a great deal of repetition would you be likely to succeed in this goal. Ultimately, however, your performance in these sessions is inconsequential as long as the person doesn't get away clean.

Aside from the vague rules of the torture sessions, the game is hindered by very slow walking speed, which is a big problem here because all you do is walk between locations. There are no encounters or any obstacles to dodge, its just crawling along the maps. The maps are small enough that this isn’t a huge problem but it is especially noticeable at the fire station where you have to circle the whole map to talk to the single person to be found there.

The game also has a cool map screen, and by cool I mean it looks cool but doesn’t make any sense at all. The paths you can take to follow along the map are completely random and arbitrary and there’s no way of knowing if you can go in any given direction or not, or even what buildings can be entered at all. You basically have to press the arrow key in every direction on every tile along the way to see where you can and can’t go. Obfuscating the basic navigation mechanics of the game is just ridiculous. At least give a line or some kind of mark on the screen so I know where I can go. Or better yet, a simple choice box probably would have worked much better. Looking cool should never come before basic functionality. Fortunately, this problem has also been corrected in the latest release, so it is not nearly the blight on the game it once was.



Characters and Story 1/5
Way back at the beginning of this review I rambled on about my misgivings about the “torture porn” genre of films. If you didn’t like that, too bad, because here I’m going to go off on a tangent about slasher films.

The reason slasher films are generally not well-received (with some notable exceptions) is a basic disconnect with the characters. In most of these films we are introduced to a group of protagonists who are, frankly, horrible, disgusting and incredibly stupid people who generally do something really, really terrible to the film’s “killer.” While the killer is set up by the film as a ruthless monster and the protagonists are meant to appeal to our sympathies, this falls apart quickly when it is revealed the “heroes” are too dumb to live and that the killer usually has a really good motive to come after them all for revenge. Is it any wonder we end up rooting for the killers in most of these movies? It’s because we don’t like these people and enjoy watching them die.

Why do I bring this up? Because this would have worked here. Assuming Verge takes the role of the killer, with his sobbers in the victim role, if Verge had been set up sympathetically or genuinely downtrodden and the various victims as generally being bad people, torturing them might actually be less repulsive (and this actually does sort of happen at the game’s climax, but by then it was far too late to salvage this game.) But this is not the case. We are given little real understanding of Verge. We are told that he tortures people in order to feel close to them, but since I’m not a goddamn lunatic I find this position impossible to identify with. A basic failure to understand human emotions is not a cause for empathy. The various victims, on the other hand, are mostly pretty nice people. One of them is a pretty young kindergarten teacher with a disabled husband. The game expects me to brutally torture and murder this woman. I would much rather murder the protagonist.

So, before you can torture any of your victims you have to seduce and lure them to your basement. You accomplish this by striking up conversations with random pedestrians. You are given a short little blurb about each character, telling you about their personality, and you must use this knowledge to get on their good side. You’ll have two gauges, a bar that measures the character’s affinity towards you, and a second gauge that does hell if I know because nothing in this game is explained. They’ll ask you various questions and you must answer based on what you know about them. I’ll admit Verge comes across as a fairly smooth operator here, but there are many times where you’ll be presented with questions where no answer is obviously right or wrong ,but you can still be penalized. Get too many wrong and the victim will leave. This obliges you to…leave the screen and come back. It’s just a hoop to jump through, and with the slow walking speed, it’s just an annoyance. With a little more work this aspect could have been made better, but ultimately it comes across as unrealistic that anyone would ever follow this psychopath home after a two minute conversation.



This is probably the biggest problem I have with this game. The game invites us to sympathize with a character that is pretty hard to like. Verge is sad, pathetic, and lonely, and his only creative outlet in life is murdering people. The game attempts to humanize, trivialize and excuse his abhorrent behavior as somehow acceptable. The problem for me at least was that I liked most of the random pedestrians more than Verge, and hence this put me in a difficult spot as a player. Maybe that was the point of the game, I'm not sure. But the ultimate object of this game is that you end up torturing likable people for online cred and to impress a girl, and that just turned me off from the whole idea. Whether there was meant to be some greater meaning behind all this is largely irrelevant, because nothing of the sort is ever truly explored in the narrative or in the characters. If the ultimate point of the game is to make me not want to play, it's possible you have succeeded at some sort of message, but you certainly don't have much of a game.

The narrative claims to be a love story, but I don’t buy that either. At least not any kind of love I can identify with so it’s hard to objectively label it as such. Add in some really weird subplot involving Verge’s long lost brother that pretty much makes no sense and isn’t given any proper explanation, and the main narrative falls apart entirely. The dialogue is okay, not great, but the only character who is at all interesting is Daily, who comes across as genuinely twisted, but in the end this just isn’t enough to overcome the other flaws in this story’s construction.

Music and Sound 3/5:
The music choice for this game was a little unusual, what with many scenes playing fairly morose lyrical songs to set the somber mood. It was a little unusual, but I didn’t hate it. The sound effects used for the various traps are appropriate and sound in general was well placed. I really have no complaints in this area.

Overall 1.5/5
Now, before everyone jumps down my throat for daring to attack someone who is trying to be new and inventive in the RM world, for striking down someone trying to break new ground, I will say this. I believe this is a genuine attempt on the part of the creator to approach this subject matter seriously and with gravity. I don’t think he necessarily failed in this respect as much as I feel like this isn’t really a subject that can be approached tastefully. I dislike torture movies but people can watch them passively, in this game you are actively inflicting the torture and this creates a strong dissonance with the player. Stalking people isn’t fun for normal people. Stripping people naked and raping them isn’t fun for normal people. Brutally murdering people in your basement isn’t fun for normal people. I don’t think it is really possible to really enjoy this game, or if it is even meant to be enjoyed, much less ever be able to admit to someone that you enjoyed it. There are some genres that can be adapted to game form, but this is not one of them.