Escape from Death Reviews

Good

I like spiders, is that wrong? If someone took a handful of spiders and put them in my mouth, and I would have to eat them. Maybe I could do it. But I know I would feel guilty about it.

It can be really difficult for an author to strike a balance between over-exposition and leaving the reader confused. This is particularly difficult when the setting is intended to be surreal, bizarre, alien, or similar. I think some titles from CoG that manage to pull this off include Choice of the Deathless, Changeling Charade, Tower Behind the Moon, and Faerie's Bargain. All of these titles are able to throw allusions and the unknown at you in a way that you are still able to make sense of it. They have crafted the Potemkin illusion that every little random thing is imbued with depth and meaning, that the fictional world is infinitely complex and yet comprehensible. Escape from Death aims to insert you into a surrealistic - and awful - afterlife as a fish out of water. Some amount of confusion comes with the territory. Unfortunately, I was just baffled throughout most of it and not in a good way. More along the lines of "Ok we escaped from that person" only for two scenes later we are going back to that place and one of the options is to go meet up with them. Like, did I miss something important? Aren't we on the run? There's also a politicking mechanic that is really odd, and you don't have enough information to understand anything that's going on in a story sense. A lot of it only makes sense *as a game.* I get it, ok, I do this or talk to this person to raise their relationship level so they will trust me more - but few actions seem coherent as part of the story or the character's motivations. Anyway it's just confusing. It isn't badly written really - like I said, surreal storytelling is hard. But the world of this game just never really clicked for me, I never "got it."