Video Game / Escape Lala

Once in a while
A hero is chosen
For a journey

In the land of Lala

—Introduction of Escape Lala 2

Escape Lala is a series of two first-person point-and-click adventure puzzle games by DuckbearLab, with a third seemingly in development. Both games feature a nameless, unseen protagonist who must solve a variety of puzzles in the magical land of Lala.

The first game, Escape Lala, was released on February 14, 2019. In it, the protagonist must simply escape from a cave in Lala. You can play it for free on Steam here.

The second game, Escape Lala 2, was released on July 18 of the same year. This game expands on pretty much everything about the first. It has a more complex story in which you have to save the princess of Lala from an evil wizard... or so it seems. This game includes a much, much larger map to explore, more puzzles, more game mechanics, as well as minigames and other new features. You can purchase it here.

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This series contains examples of:

Tropes in both games

• Featureless Protagonist: The games are done in first person, and almost no details of the protagonist are shown or revealed. One book in the library in the second game hints that the protagonist might be a member of the royal family, but the book is written in a Story Branching style, so it may have nothing to do with the protagonist at all. The games subtly reveal some broad details about the protagonist, though. In the first game, when you come up out of the water, you hear a rather masculine-sounding voice gasping for air. In the second game, the guard in the underworld refuses to let the protagonist go through the door for the dead, proving that the protagonist is not Dead All Along like nearly everyone else in Lala. Of course, there's also the issue of whether or not the protagonists of each game are even the same person.
• Gold Is Yellow: Enforced. All golden coins are bright yellow, including Hint Coins, which are scattered around the map. Due to the game's Retraux style, finding these coins is a literal Pixel Hunt. To collect a Hint Coin, you will often have to click an area as small as 1 or 2 pixels. However, the yellow coloration of these pixels (which is admittedly sometimes a duller yellow due to darker lighting) helps them stand out enough for players to find them.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The Hint Coins are of the Optional variety of this trope. You don't have to find all the coins to complete each game, but you do have to find them if you want to get the highest score, as well as an achievement in the second game.
• Hints Are for Losers: Both games have coins you can use to gain hints, but using them will deduct from your final score.
• Nameless Narrative: Almost none of the characters have definitive names. Cubic Pearl from 2 is the only character who might have one, but even then, that might just be the name of its species rather than an individual name.
• Retraux: Both games are done in an 8-bit pixel art style. The first game also uses 8-bit-esque music for the most part, but the sequel does away with this.
• Silence Is Golden: The games make very minimal use of dialogue. There is no dialogue in the first game, and the only dialogue in the second game comes from a magic spell that lets you speak to certain animals, and later to the souls of the dead. Justified because you never get to meet any live human characters.
• Treasure Room: Both games contain a different room with multiple piles of gold coins. Each pile will have a Hint Coin or two if you click on them.

Tropes specific to Escape Lala

• Giant Flyer: If you look out the cave window, you'll see the silhouette of a giant, flying creature in the distance. It kind of looks like a pterodactyl, but with a round head.
• MacGyvering: At the end, you escape Lala by making a grappling hook out of some rope and an anchor.
• No Antagonist: There are no characters trying to stop you from escaping Lala, just a series of puzzles you need to solve.
• No Plot? No Problem!: The first game has virtually no plot explicitly presented to the player. There are, however, some subtle hints at lore, such as a room containing three empty suits of armor, each holding weapons or a battering ram, seemingly recoiling in terror at something that was in the room ahead.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Subverted. In one dark room, you see what look like three pairs of red eyes. Once you light up the room, it turns out that these are just the centers of three pairs of flowers.

Tropes specific to Escape Lala 2

• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The wizard and the princess ascend to heaven, Together in Death, after you help them move on.
• Big Bad: The princess is missing, and there is a Wanted poster depicting a sinister-looking wizard. Subverted when it turns out that the wizard is not evil at all; in fact, he is the princess's lover. With that in mind, the next possible candidate for Big Bad might be the king or queen; whoever is in charge of the army trying to break into the wizard's castle. This person might be the reason why the wizard and princess were Star-Crossed Lovers, but we don't really get any information about who this person is, exactly.
• Book Ends: The main game both begins and ends in the air god's room.
• Clam Trap: A giant clam guards a cube-shaped pearl that you need in order to proceed. If you try to take the pearl, the clam will slam shut. To get the pearl, you have to exploit this trope by placing a thorny branch in the clam's mouth. When the clam slams shut, it will hurt itself on the thorns, forcing the clam to open itself, allowing you to take the pearl.
• Creepy Changing Painting: Inverted. There are some pictures in the castle that start out creepy or depressing, but become more positive as you progress through the game:
  • When you first enter the castle, you see a painting of the princess, but it's animated, and you can both see and hear her crying. It later changes to show the princess and the wizard hugging each other tightly, with a heart in between them.
  • The wizard has several "WANTED" posters in the castle, which depict him as a shadowy figure with evil eyes. They later change to show the wizard's true self, an innocent, smiling young man.
• Dead All Along: Everyone (except the protagonist and the army trying to break into the castle.) Most notably, the princess and the wizard, the former of which you're led to think you're trying to save from the latter, are both dead, and a big part of the game involves helping them move on to the afterlife.
• Fishing Minigame: One minigame has a hand on a fishing line go into a small pool of water. When the fishing line is tugged, you have to click as fast as possible to catch a fish. The fish you catch are stored in an aquarium in the same room.
• Leitmotif: The princess is associated with a Lonely Piano Piece. It first plays when you find her "MISSING" poster, and it later plays every time the princess appears in some form.
• Lonely Piano Piece: The princess's Leitmotif is a melancholic piano waltz, fitting for her backstory, which is even more tragic than you are initially led to believe. Subverted later in the game, where it is used in a happier context after you help her and the wizard move on to the afterlife.
• Miles Gloriosus: In one room of the wizard's castle, you see a mousehole with several, tiny warning signs placed outside. If you try to talk to the mouse, it will order you to stay away. If you get into the room on the other side and click on the mouse, it will simply give an adorably frightened squeak and run through the mousehole.
• Natural Elements: Lala has gods for each of the four elements: water, earth, fire, and air. They are represented by stone faces placed around the map. There is a glass bottle that you must fill with each element and put in the corresponding stone face to open a door.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: The wizard, who is portrayed as an evil figure on his Wanted posters, was actually a kind young man. He and the princess were Star-Crossed Lovers.
• Perplexing Pearl Production: A weird example. There is a giant clam with a cube-shaped pearl. With a face. As it turns out, the pearl lives with a small colony of others of its kind, so it's implied that the clam actually captured the pearl rather than creating it.
• Post-End Game Content: The game technically "ends" when you exit the cave through the air god statue's mouth, but there are still so many rooms and secrets to find after that.
• Red Herring: You have to collect samples of each of the four elements to give to the corresponding statue for each elemental god. The places where you can get samples for the water, earth, and fire gods are easy to figure out, but it's hard to figure out where to get a sample of air. There is a room containing several floating clouds, yet you cannot collect the clouds. As it turns out, you just have to give the air god the empty bottle, since it technically contains air.
• Story Breadcrumbs: There is a deep story involving a princess and a mysterious wizard, but the story is never spelled out exactly. Instead, you'll figure it out for yourself by exploring the castle and caves where the game takes place.
• Tentacled Terror: Subverted. There is a large, creepy-looking squid with red eyes in one room. It turns out to be completely docile, and even gives you some ink.
• Together in Death: Although it's not clear at first, the main goal of this game turns out to be helping the princess and the wizard move on to the afterlife so they can finally be together.
• Top God: The air god is implied to be the leader of Lala's element-themed pantheon. The air god's statue is featured in the game's Book Ends, and a book in the library reveals that the air god is supposedly the one who wrote the rules for who is and isn't allowed to ascend to the afterlife.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The end of the game's trailer shows the spirits of the wizard and the princess Together in Death in the heavens, which you don't see in-game until the Post-End Game Content. However, because the spirits just look like floating orbs, the context of the scene in the trailer is not immediately obvious.
• Wham Shot: Entering the wizard's throne room in the castle to see a lifeless skeleton in his chair. He was Dead All Along.

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