Imprisoned
originally posted on Reddit
Myth Thrazz’s Imprisoned came out over ten years ago, one of a handful of short, mostly puzzle-oriented games released under the Hosted Games label in the first couple years of its existence. The premise is simple: your PC is being held in a dungeon, accused of various crimes, and the goal is to get out or die trying.
Although it doesn’t begin to approach the quality writing, delightful worldbuilding, or beautiful complexity of Kiss from Death or The Vampire Regent, Imprisoned relies upon the same basic gameplay mechanism: once you go through the basics of creating your character, you spend most of the rest of the game choosing from among the available options of ways to spend your limited time. How best to use your time depends largely on the skills you have to start with, although some things can be accomplished more than one way. There are nearly two dozen possible endings, including multiple ways to die and multiple ways to escape.
Unfortunately, the PC never coheres into anything more than a collection of stats. Supposedly it’s possible to find out the secret behind your arrest, but that hasn’t happened any of the times I’ve played. Aside from this, the character has no backstory, no real personality traits, not even much in the way of emotions - nothing to make the reader care, beyond a desire to win the game.
I’m not a fan of the writing style. I get the feeling that the author was aiming for the kind of witty meta narrative voice that makes Choice of the Dragon so delightful, but that sort of tone is very hard to do well, and it’s not done well here. The harder the game tries to be clever, the more it just makes me cringe. It’s also apparent that English isn’t this writer’s first language; unlike some non-native speakers who have written for Hosted Games, Thrazz doesn’t attempt a level or style of writing outside the scope of his proficiency, so it’s never too hard to understand what’s going on, but a little copyediting would have gone a long way towards making the game feel polished.
The greatest flaw with this game, however, lies with its construction. For a game which revolves so completely around skill stats, it’s not always easy to discern the significance of certain answers in the character-creation stage. For one thing, although the publisher’s blurb never so much as hints at it, it’s possible to play this game as an elf or a dwarf, with consequences for abilities, relationships with other characters, and how long you can go without sleep before dying of fatigue, but you’d only find that out if you happened to choose the right answer to a question about whether your eyes are open or closed. (Later, the game will ask the PC’s attractiveness on a scale from 1-10, “in the bounds of your own race.” If you understand this to mean that what makes a dwarf attractive to another dwarf isn’t necessarily appealing to a human, this is fine, but if you’ve reached this point not knowing that there are other sapient species in this game, the implications are pretty gross.)
If this game weren’t free to win, I would be hard-pressed to think of anyone I could particularly recommend it to. There are better puzzle games out there. There are better free puzzle games, and some of them are even in ChoiceScript. But Imprisoned is fairly fun if you can see past its flaws, and with so many different endings, it definitely has plenty of replay value. If you’re looking for an undemanding, but not entirely mindless, way to pass the time, it’s worth a try.
Anyway, I haven’t posted any reviews there in a while, so you probably haven’t missed anything.