Escaped Chasm
Jun. 19th, 2025 08:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingEscaped Chasm
https://tuyoki.itch.io/escaped-chasm
Escaped Chasm is a 25-minute dark fantasy narrative adventure game created in RPG Maker with a mix of retro Game Boy graphics and anime-style cutscenes. Originally released in 2019, it’s the first stand-alone project of Temmie Chang, a longtime friend and collaborator of Toby Fox who contributed character designs and graphics to Undertale and Deltarune.
You play as a young teenage “Lonely Girl” who doesn’t leave the house and lives vicariously through her dreams and art. Her parents appear to have gone missing, and she doesn’t know what to do. To make matters worse, she’s tired all the time, and a strange man has started appearing in her house.
Something is seriously wrong, and the Lonely Girl has four days to figure it out and escape. If leaving the house isn’t an option, where can she go? And how can she find the courage to leave?
Escaped Chasm is free to download, and the zip file contains an illustrated guide to the game’s four endings. I get the feeling that most players will probably see the good ending simply by playing the game naturally, but it’s nice to have grimdark alternatives. After unlocking the good ending, the player is able to enter and explore a bonus “developer’s room” that I love with all my heart. It’s fascinating to read Chang’s thoughts about the game while checking out extra material that fills out a few gaps in the story.
Both Toby Fox and Temmie Chang were fans of and contributors to Homestuck, and it’s easy to see traces of Homestuck in Escaped Chasm. It’s difficult to summarize Homestuck, but the webcomic begins as a story about four young teenagers who can’t leave their houses because they’re the last remaining survivors of a universe that’s unravelling around them. I get the sense that the Lonely Girl in Escaped Chasm is based on one of the four teenagers in Homestuck, Jade Harley, and she’s found herself in a remarkably similar situation.
Escaped Chasm is like a bridge between Homestuck and Deltarune in its theme of “using art and imagination to escape into another world,” but it’s also very much its own thing. I love Chang’s illustration style and narrative voice, and I admire how she pushes the boundaries of the medium to create a palpable sense of liminality and dread – and of catharsis and joy. Escaped Chasm is atmospheric horror with a (potentially) happy ending, and it’s idiosyncratic and self-indulgent in interesting ways that elevate it above the level of mere pastiche.
Escaped Chasm is a short test project made in preparation for Dweller’s Empty Path (on Itchio here), a more extensive Game Boy style narrative adventure game. I really enjoyed Escaped Chasm, and I’m looking forward to jumping into Dweller’s Empty Path.
https://tuyoki.itch.io/escaped-chasm
Escaped Chasm is a 25-minute dark fantasy narrative adventure game created in RPG Maker with a mix of retro Game Boy graphics and anime-style cutscenes. Originally released in 2019, it’s the first stand-alone project of Temmie Chang, a longtime friend and collaborator of Toby Fox who contributed character designs and graphics to Undertale and Deltarune.
You play as a young teenage “Lonely Girl” who doesn’t leave the house and lives vicariously through her dreams and art. Her parents appear to have gone missing, and she doesn’t know what to do. To make matters worse, she’s tired all the time, and a strange man has started appearing in her house.
Something is seriously wrong, and the Lonely Girl has four days to figure it out and escape. If leaving the house isn’t an option, where can she go? And how can she find the courage to leave?
Escaped Chasm is free to download, and the zip file contains an illustrated guide to the game’s four endings. I get the feeling that most players will probably see the good ending simply by playing the game naturally, but it’s nice to have grimdark alternatives. After unlocking the good ending, the player is able to enter and explore a bonus “developer’s room” that I love with all my heart. It’s fascinating to read Chang’s thoughts about the game while checking out extra material that fills out a few gaps in the story.
Both Toby Fox and Temmie Chang were fans of and contributors to Homestuck, and it’s easy to see traces of Homestuck in Escaped Chasm. It’s difficult to summarize Homestuck, but the webcomic begins as a story about four young teenagers who can’t leave their houses because they’re the last remaining survivors of a universe that’s unravelling around them. I get the sense that the Lonely Girl in Escaped Chasm is based on one of the four teenagers in Homestuck, Jade Harley, and she’s found herself in a remarkably similar situation.
Escaped Chasm is like a bridge between Homestuck and Deltarune in its theme of “using art and imagination to escape into another world,” but it’s also very much its own thing. I love Chang’s illustration style and narrative voice, and I admire how she pushes the boundaries of the medium to create a palpable sense of liminality and dread – and of catharsis and joy. Escaped Chasm is atmospheric horror with a (potentially) happy ending, and it’s idiosyncratic and self-indulgent in interesting ways that elevate it above the level of mere pastiche.
Escaped Chasm is a short test project made in preparation for Dweller’s Empty Path (on Itchio here), a more extensive Game Boy style narrative adventure game. I really enjoyed Escaped Chasm, and I’m looking forward to jumping into Dweller’s Empty Path.
