Our Lovely Escape is a 2019 visual novel produced by Canadian indie studio Reine Works and published by Top Hat Studios.
You play as a writer for Reine Works, a fictionalized version of the game company creating otome visual novels. Your boss is the stern, serious Lissa Vogel, and your co-workers are ditzy artist Alexis Ainsworth and quiet coder Mayu Ueda. You are wrapping up production on a novel, and life seems rather ordinary. Will you find love in the office? Or will life just go on as normal?
In short, your basic romance game, with the main character's gender being determined by the player's choice, and optional sex scenes can be thrown in.
Just try not to get a bad ending.
The game contains examples of following tropes:
- Accidental Murder: One of Mayu's bad endings has her accidentally kill the player character during an argument.
- Asshole Victim: The unnamed assailant who assaulted Alexis in the past, only to himself be killed in self-defense.
- Beleaguered Boss: Downplayed. While most of the staff (including the player, for the most part) is competent, Lissa's inner circle consists of a ditzy slacker (Alexis) and and a quiet, often scary girl (Mayu).
- Big Eater: Alexis is known to take snack breaks on the job, often to the detriment of her work.
- Clingy Jealous Girl: Mayu is known to get jealous easily, particularly when Lissa gets involved. Jealous enough to kill, even.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Alexis was once attacked on the street, and responded by killing the man in self-defense.
- Featureless Protagonist: While the player does have an established past and personality, we never actually see their face, or even body, likely a result of the ability to chose their gender.
- Firing Day: One ending, achieved by not choosing a girl and bombing the email minigame, results in Lissa firing the player, who then ends up thinking about starting a new life, complete with a potential new love in the form of the waitress at the gyoza restaurant.
- The Many Deaths of You: The game has a surprising amount of bloody death scenes for a romantic visual novel. You can die on accident, Mayu can kill you, Alexis can kill you, Mayu and Alexis can kill you...
- Mean Boss: Lissa's not exactly a jerkass, but her authority over her employees is as unquestioned as her stubborn streak, and she doesn't pull her punches when it comes to calling out employees she thinks are screwing up, even to the point of cursing at them. One of Alexis's bad endings even sees her calling the player into her office, where Mayu kills them.
- Mood Whiplash: Play the game right, and you'll find true love. Play it wrong, however, and the effects from range from nothing changing, to heartbreak, all the way up to the player dying. In fact, even if you do take the right path, you may come across something much darker than expected, such as the reveal of Alexis's past.
- Parental Abandonment: It's mentioned that Lissa's parents left her as a child.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: Other than mentions of where you stand among Reine Works' employee gender balance, among a few NSFW alterations, the gender choice has no real effect on the game.
- Shout-Out: One of your messages in your email inbox is from a "Saiki K.".
- The Slacker: Alexis spends most of her time downing chips and pawning her work off to others, much to Lissa's chagrin.
- Sympathetic Murder Backstory: Alexis reveals in her good ending that she killed a man who was attacking her.
- What the Hell, Player?: Try to beat around the bush regarding your relationship with Lissa? Say goodbye to her. Get impatient with Alexis? She quits and dumps you. Refuse to accept Lissa's camgirl side gig? Mayu and Alexis kill you.
- Yandere: Mayu has shades of this, being somewhat clingy and creepy at times, though it's in certain bad endings where such traits truly become evident, to the point of killing the player for varying reasons.
