Escape from the Crazy Place

J. J. Guest's picture
Escape_Cover_Alt.jpg

You've been locked in a padded cell for no obvious reason with only a deranged hamburger-eating clown for company. The cell doesn't even have a door. So begins an adventure that will take you to many places including custard-filled caverns, the world's worst Indian restaurant, the planet Venus, and the inside of a cereal packet. You'll meet such strange characters as the peculiar Plugalug, the mysterious Cow of Honour, Rampateuay of the Hills (a prophet who predicts things he's about to do) and the sinister Boss.

Can YOU make it alive through the forest of the Ostrich People? Fathom the mysteries of the marmalade satnav? Survive the mutiny on the 'Milky Way'? Discover why you have ham on the brain, ham on the brain, ham on the ham on the ham on the brain? Can YOU escape from the Crazy Place?

Written over 33 years, Escape from the Crazy Place is a sprawling TWINE game with over 90,000 words of text. It is also an example of exquisite corpse writing, combining the talents of around twenty different authors. Some wrote just a passage or two, others wrote dozens.

This new TWINE version was originally intended to be a trimmed-down, more polished version of the 2006 TADS 2 version, but myself and my friends Loz Etheridge and Mark Bailey got a bit carried away, and somehow or other the 2017 version ended up being two-and-a-half times the size of the original. The game will continue to expand as I intend never to stop adding to it.

"Like the twisted literary lovechild of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo and Homsar, Escape From the Crazy Place is quite possibly one of the funniest things I've ever touched!" Ryusui - rec.arts.int.fiction.

"I've been playing your online Escape from the Crazy Place for the last half hour and I have to say it's... well, the best damn thing I've ever seen ever." Sprite - The Adrift Forum.

"This is a surrealist gem. I've never beaten it, despite spending some time on it, but the remarkably surreal world kind of sucks you and drags you along." Bad Dog Studios - IFDB.

Author: 
J. J. Guest
Made For: 
An event

Comments

sergiocornaga's picture

A design flaw of

A design flaw of glorioustrainwrecks.exe is that it currently only sees games that are attached to an event, so you'll need to set an event for this game if I'm going to test it can run it properly!

J. J. Guest's picture

Does 'An Event' count as an

Does 'An Event' count as an event? Hope this works for you...

Danni's picture

"Made for" refers to the old

"Made for" refers to the old event system we had that we are no longer using. Generally you should always set it to "An event".
"Event created for" refers to the new event system currently in use.

Confusingly, "an event" also refers to an actual event in the new system created by Smedis2.

J. J. Guest's picture

Interesting. Thanks for

Interesting. Thanks for letting me know! I've set the second one to 'Testing' instead.

Danni's picture

Actually, you changed the

Actually, you changed the wrong one.

But it probably doesn't matter anyway.

sergiocornaga's picture

I believe J. J. Guest

I believe J. J. Guest changed both 'An Event' to 'testing' and set 'no event' to the event 'an event' (but has now changed 'testing' back to 'An Event'). Confusing!

Sadly, while glorioustrainwrecks.exe can now download the game, it says 'failed to detect game file in archive'. I checked, and Gargoyle can run the .gam file (albeit without illustrations) but I imagine using the same file extension that shows up in hundreds of other archives on the site (but doesn't mean the same thing at all) could make it difficult to teach glorioustrainwrecks.exe to open it. We may just have to wait for the Twine version to come out and render this problem meaningless!

J. J. Guest's picture

Sorry, I got confused about

Sorry, I got confused about which one should be which. Gargoyle will run the game without illustrations, whereas the TADS 2 player's kit will run it with them. They're not essential. So the game is as it should be, but I will update to the TWINE version as soon as it's ready.

There's also an online HTML version here:

http://www.jjguest.com/ESCAPE/INDEX.HTML

It's not quite as extensive as the TADS version, and one or two pages require Flash. The intention is to replace this version with the TWINE one when it's done.

spiral's picture

I love that this is more than 20 years in the making

I certainly don't have anything of mine I started as a kid that I could pick up again, which is a shame!

I like how well the scenes fit together, in their own ridiculous, child-like imagination logic. Similar to Mastaba Snoopy, no matter what bizzare random things Escape from throws at me, they feel like they have a place in this world.

I think what I enjoy most of all is the constant re-formatting of how options are displayed to the reader, some times in ways that can't be used in the way they're shown. It's one of my favourite 'genre's of tricks, so to speak, and I think it's a highlight of what this adventure does.

J. J. Guest's picture

A Massive Expansion of the 2006 Version!

Three years ago when I originally submitted Escape from the Crazy Place to Glorious Trainwrecks, I promised that I would return with an all-new TWINE version of the game.

The TWINE version was originally intended to be a trimmed-down, more polished version of the 2006 TADS 2 version, but myself and my friends Loz Etheridge and Mark Bailey got a bit carried away, and somehow or other the 2017 version ended up being two-and-a-half times the size of the original. As such I've entered it into the The No Pressure Appreciation Nicejam.

If you enjoy playing it, I'd really appreciate a review on IFDB! Link: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ny5d87fqbeh3pnuz

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