When you think of Detarame Factory, you probably think about chic decor and cute, cuddly alpacas. Well, once you play Nightmare Escape you're going to be thinking of blood! And jumpscares! And The Ring! And BLEEEARGHBLE! That's right, it's a horror escape game from one of the last developers you'd expect, and though it's actually still plenty cute, it's also decently gory, and, as the opening warns you, you might want to turn your volume down. To find a way out (once you've found a way in), just click to interact when the cursor changes as you mouse over objects, keeping an eye on your environment for clues, and remember you can double-click things in your inventory to view them up close. While there's something inherently charming about the ghoulishness here, if you prefer to avoid blood and screamers, you may want to approach this one cautiously if at all. Some of the puzzles may be a little awkwardly implemented or unintuitive, but I guess if you want to get away from this creepy place, you'll figure it out, won't you?
Walkthrough Guide
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WALKTHROUGH
Non-spoiler information: There's one "endding."
1)
Oh great. A castle. And close to a cemetery. Terrific. People live too close to cemeteries. If you want to fund my Kickstarter campaign where I jettison all corpses into the sun (first, it lessens our risk of zombie attacks; and then b-of-all the ghost situation plaguing our planet would come to pretty much a halt and YOU ARE ALL WELCOME), send me an email: mbevel at gmail dot com. Anyway.
If you click the castle, we're told it's locked. So we need to find a key. Or our cell phone, to call a friend or a cab to take us away from here because no good will come of exploring I AM SURE OF IT.
2)
If you click to the right, there's an owl, one of the creepier birds we have. The owl wants an apple -- I think. The apple is orange, so you can see my confusion. Make a note of that (the apple, not my confusion). Also, if you want to fund my Kickstarter campaign where I jettison all owls into the sun, you've got my contact deets, right? Good.
There's also a tomb in the middle that I STRONGLY SUGGEST WE NOT MESS WITH. Because it's a tomb. And they're the worst. I also have a tomb-jettisoning Kickstarter. Anyway: this tomb has some kind of security code on it because whatever is inside is probably pretty sure-fire evil so, again: MAYBE WE SHOULD JUST LEAVE IT ALONE AND GO BACK TO OUR HOMES AND EAT SOME COOKIES. Do you have a cat? Great. Cats are terrific. Let's leave this place and go pet some cats.
Oh, and there's a pool of blood at the bottom of the screen BECAUSE OF COURSE THERE IS.
Let's go see what was to the left of the welcome screen with the castle, bats, and graves in the distance. ::deep sigh::
3)
There's a dead tree. There's a boarded over well. The boarded-over well wants us to use a crowbar on it, and why wouldn't we? Someone probably *accidentally* sealed the well shut, and certainly didn't seal it shut to keep an evil and malevolent spirit locked away from human contact like in that Very Important Documentary, "The Ring."
Clicking the tree makes it groan at you in an upsetting way.
Let's go left again.
4)
Three bats. Three graves. Three rings for elven kings under the sky. This doesn't feel right.
Clicking on each of the graves shoots a hand out of the earth, giving us numbers: 5 | 2 | 0. You might be thinking, "Maude: are you sure that's a 0, and not a 3? That hand is holding three fingers up, right?" Look, trust me, it's a 0. I'm sure we'll need that information at some point.
Another thing to notice is the direction these tombstones are leaning. The first is leaning left. The middle is leaning right. The last is not leaning. Maybe whatever was buried there was buried recently. Probably against its will. I sure hope we meet that angry spirit soon! (Jk! I am not hoping that!)
Clicking the bats does nothing but make me anxious, so don't.
5)
The only thing to do now is go back to where that terrifying menace of an owl is, because we know there's a numerical lock.
When you click on the middle tomb, notice under where we imput the numbers that there are either claw marks or directional slashes -- or both. Probably both. Something clawed this tomb in a helpful way, and that's why we know that the combination is: 2 | 0 | 5 | 5.
We get a shovel.
We do we have a shovel?
WHAT IN GOD'S NAME ARE WE DIGGING UP WITH A SHOVEL?
6)
Let's go back to the horrifying tree, because it is clear that what we're supposed to do is subvert every natural human impulse for self-preservation and just go hang around creepy trees near boarded up wells on properties that could REALLY use a neighbor kid or two to stop by on the regular to do things like mow the lawn and kill zombies.
If you click between the tree and the well, now that you have that shovel, you can accesa a weird lump in the ground. CLICK IT! Click the weird lump! What could go wrong in a haunted mansion? NOTHING!
Clicking it gets you a weird key with a pumpkin-head -- like from that terrific and very truthful documentary I saw, "Pumpkinhead." Get the key.
7)
There's only one place we can use the key: the castle. Use the key on the castle.
8)
The interior of the castle -- the castle infested with owls, bats, blood pools, scary trees, and graves -- is surprisingly tasteful. Like, that carpet is nicer than my own carpet. We also see: a blue door and a green door on the left; and a yellow door on the right. And a vase -- but I think vases are kinda fussy, don't you? And there are always, ALWAYS, dead flies in vases and that's just gross. What I'm saying is: I have a Kickstarter you can help fund that will jettisone all vases into the sun.
The blue and green door both need keys.
We can click the vase, so let's do that.
9)
Okay, that was a terrible idea.
If you click the vase, it, too, moans, a horrible face appears, and it tells you it wants blood. WHY DO YOU EVEN HAVE A VASE LIKE THIS? This is why now, more than ever, you need to stop playing this game and send me money to that aforementioned Kickstarter.
We know there's a blood pool over by the demonic owl. Maybe we'll find a bucket or something somewhere.
10)
Open the yellow door isn't any better. There's a skeleton in there -- but of course there'd be, because this is also a home-owner who owns a literal blood-thirsty vase.
Click his liver. Or spleen. Or liver. Look: I don't know anything about what's inside the human body because Nature, in her infinite wisdom, made us opaque. The skeleton moans when you do this. I'd probably moan too, in a creepy way. But let's hope none of you ever have to find out what I sound like when you touch my liver.
You can also click the knife in the skeleton's skull. This guy...met a bad end. But his bad end means your gain because you now have a knife!
Oh, and now the skeleton has fallen completely apart. I guess that knife was a load-bearing knife. If you click that liver/spleen/liver thing again, though, I have great news: IT IS NOW A KEY! YOU HAVE A LIVER/SPLEEN/LIVER KEY! HOORAY! (This is actually not great news and if you need to go lay down for a spell, I TOTALLY FEEL YOU.
Some other things in this room:
a) There's a plate on the wall that tells you you'll need a screwdriver.
b) There are spiderwebs, because no one takes care of housekeeping any more these days.
c) A garbage can with a combination lock on it. I don't know about you, but I keep my garbage cans outside, but that's only because I was raised right.
Let's leave this hopeless room.
11)
The liver/spleen/liver key opens the blue door. We've come this far, we may as well go in.
Oh, hey: someone is an art collector! It's not good art, of course, but it's also not a stabbed-in-the-head skeleton, so I'll take this as a baby step and not comment further. There are four squares on the wall. One is a painting(?) of a person. The other three are cabinets. Maybe. We'll go with cabinets. I guess they could also be like those weird doors in morgues where dead bodies are kept. In fact, it's almost certainly that because it just fits the general aesthetic of this house.
If you click the painting, the person's eyes shift to the left. This may be important. Or the painting just may not be able to look at you right now because it knows you've been elbow-deep in skeleton guts.
If you click around the area the painting appears to be looking, you'll find a panel. The panel tells you you want a...wheel? Sure, why the heck now.
To the right of the painting is an image of three up arrows in a column. You can click on the arrows to change their position. We'll probably be doing that soon.
Below the painting is a pirate mouse in a knife-stabbed barrel. I DON'T KNOW WHY, WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS ASKING ME THESE QUESTIONS?
To the right of the pirate mouse is a jar of eyeballs. Okay then. I'll just leave now because it looks like whoever owns this house wasn't expecting company.
However, if you can bear to look at those eyes for a couple more seconds, you'll notice each is staring off in a different direction. I bet that corresponds to those arrows in the box above this. The eyes are pointing at roughly noon (if we're thinking of a clock), nine, and four.
Go back to the arrows, put each one in the corresponding position, and you're rewarded with red fruit. Oh boy.
You can use the knife on the red fruit.
And, as it turns out, you can use the knife on the pirate mouse in the barrel. I DON'T LIKE THAT I KNOW YOU CAN DO THIS. But doing causes a HUGE spurt of blood and results in you having a mouse-headed key. Hoo...ray? (Oh, and remember to take the knife back from the barrel because you probably have a LOT more knifing/murdering to do, you stud you.)
Before we leave this room to do something with the red fruit and atone for the casual murder we just committed, I guess it's worth noting that if you click the ground-level spider web, it glistens, which is gross, but probably important. Maybe we put something in there later. Not the red fruit. We get to hold on to that for a little while longer.
12)
The mouse's head opens the green door and that's a sentence you don't get to type every day! I MADE IT, MA!
But we're not going to worry about that just yet. Let's see what else this knife can do. It murders mice, it holds up skeletons. I bet it can cut a branch off of a creepy tree. Let's try it!
Use the knife on the creepy tree to get a branch. (That's also the last you'll see of your knife -- which means your days of knifing, at least in this game, are over.)
13)
Going back into the castle, and into the painting room, you can now use the branch to brush away the spiderweb covering that door-shaped space on the wall. Nothing else happens yet. Do you think you'll get, like, a paycheck for all the cleaning you're doing?
14)
If you go in the skeleton room, you can brush away the spiderweb that's covering the hole in the floor where something growls at you. Give it the fruit! Why? I DON'T KNOW! But it seems like a terrific idea. Nothing happens. But maybe later.
15)
And you can also use that branch in the room behind the green door. There's a book with a TONNE of colored dots in it. And if you clear the spiderweb from the door, you'll see that it has three locks in three colors: blue, orange, and red. This just happens to correspond to the three keys you have: the blue pirate-mouse-head (R.I.P., li'l buddy), the red liver/spleen/liver, and the orange pumpkin head. This reveals another code we need to solve involving letters of the alphabet. I just can't with this right now.
16)
Also in the green room, in the middle cabinet, is a puzzle that wants us to add up colors (kinda). We can do this now because we have access to that dusty book on the floor because SOMEONE spent all of his money on owls and not on bookshelves. You might think, "Oh, I'll just count these dots. Got it!" But you'd be wrong and foolish and thank GOD I am here. You don't want to count. You want to make shapes. So: the dots that make up the brown shape and the dots that make up the grey shape will combine to make the shape of a number -- in this case, 4. Green + pink = 2. Black + blue = 6.
We've got a screwdriver! Let's go immediately to the skeleton room because I know we can use the screwdriver there. (Look how into this I am, now! Not terrified at all!)
17)
I AM OFFICIALLY NOT INTO THIS ANY MORE, GUYS.
Removing the plate from the wall gets us a HORRIBLE SCENE OF THAT GIRL FROM THAT DOCUMENTARY I MENTIONED, "THE RING." She leaves five bloody footprints. Did I soil myself? NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. But yes.
Pick up the fruit you left for the...whatever, in the hole. I can't believe I'm telling you to pick up floor-food, but we're all a little different now after we murdered that mouse, aren't we? Here's what we're going to do with that fruit. We're going to take it to the owl's blood pool, dip it in, and bring it back to the vase. BECAUSE I SAID SO, that's why.
18)
Go to the World's Worst Vase, give it the fruit, it'll tell you three shapes: a triangle, a star, a pentagon. We need this information. FOR REASONS.
19)
Go back to the green door room. Click on the top cabinet. That's the puzzle we needed the vase's help to solve. (Stupid vase.) Solving the puzzle gets us a crowbar, which means we can now go visit that boarded up well!
Wait, what?
20)
We're at the well. Hey, remember that time we removed a panel with a screwdriver and then saw a Japanese ghost come out of a well and leave blood footprints? OH NO REASON.
So -- you're going to use the crowbar on the well, and then a clown is going to scream at you, and I am so, so, so, so sorry. I would never design a game like this. Only monsters and garbage people would. I would design a game where we tell each other our hopes and our dreams and we make s'mores and I tell you how great your hair is looking these days. I'd do this because I AM NOT A MONSTER.
There's something funky with that clown's teeth. The first fang is red, followed by three grey fangs, and then 2 red fangs. Let's go back to the green door room.
21)
The bottom cabinet has a puzzle that's the same number of pieces as that clowns janked-up teeth. Solving it gives you the wheel/handle! Nothing terrifying happened here! We just got a wheel! Let's take it to the painting room.
22)
Perfect. The wheel is just another stupid puzzle. I guess we have to figure out how to turn the wheel.
I hate to do this to you, but we need to remember that time we removed a panel and a Japanese ghost scared us. Specifically, we need to remember those bloody footprints: left, right, left, right, left.
That'll open the door for us. And, I'll point out, there's no light in the room we just gained access to. It's just a pitch black room. This is all the worst.
Oh, wait. If we go in the room, it's just a microwave on a box. We...can't do anything here, yet? What puzzles haven't we solved?
Well:
1) We haven't given that owl an apple.
2) We haven't broken the garbage can code.
3) We haven't solved the colored alphabet code.
Let's go back to the graveyard with the hands and the bats.
23)
I can't believe I just suggested we come BACK to the graveyard. But here we are. The bats are clickable now. Click them. They'll give you a code: 2 | 4 | 1.
Let's go get that garbage!
24)
Who am I? What am I becoming? "Let's go to the graveyard!" "Let's get some garbage!" WHAT IS GOING ON?!?
25
Using the code on the garbage can, we get...garbage. I hope you were sitting down. I was as surprised as you were. It's an apple core. That owl wanted a full apple. The microwave in the painting room had a past/future setting. Guess where we're going?
26)
Go to the microwave in the painting room, put the apple in it, set it to "past" because you want the apple back (I'm curious how even more disgusting that apple would get if you set it to "future"), and then et voila! You have a full apple. Let's go talk to that owl.
27)
Giving the owl the apple allows the owl to give you a train ticket. It's in...what? Cyrilic? I can't read any of it, except there are some numbers in the lower left: 201412. (None of this is important, it turns out.)
28)
So: we have a ticket. We have our keys. We have a puzzle with colored letters. What if we looked at those keys one more time?
OH! Because: each colored key has a letter: the orange/pumpkin key has the letter K. The red liver/spleen/liver key has the letter I. The blue beheaded pirate mouse key has the letter E. That'll solve that puzzle.
29
And we're at a train station?
Couldn't we have just walked around to the back yard and...oh. Oh. I see. We need a ticket. And we needed to do all that nonsense to get an apple to give to the owl to get a ticket and OH MY GOD REALLY?
Give the tapir the ticket, and then watch as the train leaves without you. This is not terrible, because on the success screne, you see that the train is now hurtling toward the ground for a fiery explosion.
CONGRATULATIONS, GUYS! WE DID IT! (What we did, exactly, I'm still not sure. But, again: rest in peace, Pirate Mouse Dude. Rest in peace.)
Posted by: Maude Buttons
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December 19, 2014 11:39 AM