Escape from Darkavern
A review by Paul Harrington
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As I write this review, Twin Hamster's Escape from Darkavern is only a simple, proof-of-concept demo in the early stages of its production. Games this early along generally don't need reviews, but I enjoyed this one so much that I felt it deserved the extra attention.

The current demo is short and simple, but greatly satisfying. The game only takes about six minutes to complete if you know exactly what you're doing (and get very lucky in battle), but no one will complete it this easily. Why? Because, in this game, you're going to die often.

Often may be an understatement; if you don't die at least twenty times over the course of this game, consider yourself blessed. In the first room alone there are a couple of instant death traps, and it only gets more dangerous from there.

The meat of the game consists of going from room to room solving simple puzzles and claiming items while trying to avoid death, whether it comes from murderous goblins, trap-doors, or deadly breath mints. You may be wondering about that last one, which brings us to the game's strongest aspect; it's extremely tongue-in-cheek from start to finish, and the text is so well written that it will make you want to endure the continual instant death just to get to the next item description.



Although it's a very short experience, I found Escape from Darkavern to be one of the funniest OHR games I've played. The death traps, the items you find, and the battles you fight are all accompanied by well written, genuinely funny text.



I took at least a dozen screenshots to show examples of this game's humor, but decided it would be best to only post a few. Afterall, the joy of this game is discovering it for yourself, and jokes are rarely funny if you know the punchline in advance.

Darkavern, thankfully, does not have random enemy encounters. There are only four battles in the demo's dungeon, and all occur when you touch wandering enemies. This is fortunate because the battles you do fight are generally very difficult, not for the player, but for the hero. What could this mean? Well, the battles are automated. You have no control over what your hero does in battle, and whether he lives or dies (usually, he dies) is entirely up to luck. This was extremely annoying in the final fight, since all I could do was save my progress, walk up to the boss, die, and reload. After eight reloads, he was finally defeated. Also, remember to save after defeating him!

The difficulty of the fights would not be as big of a problem if the enemies were easier to avoid. As it is, the only one you can easily avoid fighting is the slime, since he moves slowly. Being killed by the instant death traps is less annoying than being killed in battle, since you can memorize where the traps are and avoid them the next time through. The traps aren't as random as they might seem at first; several are on tiles that look slightly different from normal tiles, and there's something of a pattern to the positions of the others. I don't want to spoil anything, but once I learned where it was generally safe to walk, I didn't hit too many death traps.

This demo shows a ton of potential, and is already one of the better OHR games released in recent days. The art style is great, the dialogue is great, and the gameplay is fairly unique. I'm really looking forward to where Twin Hamster goes with this next.