Escape (or die)

About Escape (or die)

Escape (or die) is the second game on novlr, a small site of daily fiction games made by Nathan Haslewood. Its own line sums it up: a story-maze where one path leads out and every other door kills you.

Each day's maze has a genre and a title, such as a fairy tale called The Holloway of Forgetting Boughs or a space station named Station Veiled Meridian, and three or four rooms in a row. Every room offers three doors, each described in a sentence: the wood it is made of, its size, what hangs on it. Only one door per room is safe, and the same unstated rule picks it in every room of the day.

When you choose a wrong door, you get a short death scene, and those deaths are the clues. They repeat the detail that doomed you, so after a death or two you can start to see which feature matters. A death sends you back to the first room, and the maze has a par: the number of rooms, so a perfect run is one door per room with no deaths.

The new maze arrives at midnight UTC, with a countdown at the top of the page and a streak kept in your browser. It suits players who like reading closely and finding the pattern behind a puzzle, rather than spelling words or knowing facts.

How to play Escape (or die)

1. Open the day's maze on novlr.com/escape and read the first room.
2. Read all three door descriptions, then pick the one you think is safe.
3. If you die, read the death scene: it names the detail that was wrong.
4. Start again from the first room and use what you learned to choose better.
5. Find the rule that holds in every room and walk out, ideally in par with no deaths.

Tips

• Compare the three doors in a room and note what differs: material, size and what hangs on them are usual suspects.
• Death scenes repeat the deadly detail word for word, so look for the phrase that recurs.
• The rule is the same in every room of the day, so test your guess against the next room before committing.
• Par is the number of rooms; a clean run is one choice per room.

Questions