User:OPOSSUM/Opossumopedia/Escape from Ojai
Escape from Ojai is a text adventure UnGame created by several Uncyclopedia users in 2024. The game is based on the A story built one X at a time series of articles, and is notable among UnGames for its use of images and large amount of references to 2020s Uncyclopedia inside jokes, notably Wolverhampton and moccasins. Several UnGames were made following Escape from Ojai due to its success. The game has over two hundred subpages as of September 27th, making it one of the largest UnGames, although it is still much smaller than Zork.
Gameplay[edit | edit source]
The player controls John, a recurring character in the A story built one X at a time series of articles, who is trying to find his way out of the California town of Ojai. Like other Uncyclopedia text adventures, the player progresses through the game by clicking hyperlinks, like a digital version of “Choose Your Own Adventure”. The game is fairly easy compared to Zork or The Abyss.
The player may take multiple paths to escape Ojai, but due to the game’s incomplete status, only one route (the trail route) leads to the end of the game. Compared to other routes in the game, the trail route is fairly linear, has relatively little text, and contains several opponents to fight, such as a deer, Knife Guy and Luna, the main antagonist of the A story built one X at a time series herself. Various checkpoints allow players to not get sent back to the very beginning of the game upon death.
What made it work[edit | edit source]
One major factor that contributed to Escape from Ojai’s success was its use of settings and characters from the popular ASBOxAAT series, known and contributed to by the majority of active Uncyclopedia users in 2024.
Nearly every area of the game had at least one image, making each section relatively memorable (for UnGame standards.) Paired with the relative linearity of the game, it was harder to get lost in Escape from Ojai than say, Abyss, despite the latter being much more fleshed-out.
The shack that becomes alive and kills the player was actually intended to set players in the right direction early on in the game.
OPOSSUM himself tried to avoid using large amounts of text in Escape from Ojai to avoid boring out players while also speeding up development, while other contributors such as DaniPine3 used more text to tell a more complicated story.
CSS effects are commonly used to make backgrounds in Escape from Ojai, also contributing to the memorability. Dark areas may have white text on black backgrounds, one death screen contains a crude animation of a horde of “grues” running towards the player, and the final fight with Luna contains a (somewhat shitty) fiery background. Many of these effects were actually reused from OPOSSUM’s other articles: for example, Luna’s fiery background was a simple reskin of Opossumopedia’s “Moccaspin” background.
