Ultimate Escape Room: IF City

This looks a lot like it's the author's first attempt at creating IF. It's lightweight, sparsely populated, and involves a series of simple puzzles that might be coding exercises. That said, it is, for the most part, not badly done.

But apparently it's not a first attempt: this appears to be the same author who gave us "Questor's Quest" in 2015. But "Questor's Quest" was a homebrew executable, and this new one is in Inform7: in a way, it's still a first attempt. It's something in a new language ... and, I suspect, there's more than just two years in between the two games. The exuberance has toned down significantly ... nearly disappeared, in fact.

Anyway, the premise here is that we're in an "escape room" game: what I think of as a real-life simulation of an IF game. Meta! So there's not a lot of story to go with the game: we're here to solve puzzles, both in the real world and in the game world. And the game's game world.

The puzzles, as I said, are pretty simple. The important thing is that they all work exactly as they should. I think the only mistake I saw was the inclusion of the escape room employee in the description of the lobby: after he wandered off, the room description continued to report him as being there. I assume the back room was meant to be an Easter egg.

It's not too bad for a first attempt, though it still has the air of being an exercise. As a breakfast, I'd call it buttered toast. Nicely browned; the bit of singe on the last slice is forgivable. Instant coffee. Not especially ambitious, perhaps, but we've all got to start somewhere. I know the author is capable of more, once they get used to their tools.