Escaped Chasm

itch.io poster art

***Escaped Chasm*** is a 2019 American adventure game developed by Temmie Chang, using the RPG Maker MV program. It follows the story of a young lonely girl attempting to find her missing parents in the house as her world is slowly crumbling and descending into chasm.

It is Temmie's first game, after her creation of indie games *Undertale* and *Deltarune* as the main designer.

## Gameplay

In *Escaped Chasm*, Lonely Girl navigates her crumbling world with the arrow keys or mouse. She can inspect objects, skip text, or confirm options with [Z]. She can also inspect her diary each day to read her latest entry, after which she will become tired and sleep until the next day.

## Plot

> *"Sometimes... When I close my eyes...When I let my mind drift...I can feel a world beyond my own. It's vast and beautiful. ...I can see through the eyes of a girl I admire...However...As my consciousness slips back to me...I remember this euphoric dream is not real...As I awaken, my connection to that world slowly fades from my memory.*
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> ...*I won't let that world escape me. I will hold onto these fragments of my dreams in any way I can.*
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> *Maybe...I can never truly reach that world... But maybe one day I can still become the girl I see in that place."*
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> **- Intro from the game**
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### Day 1

The first day begins with Lonely Girl in her room, with drawings of the girl from the Other World on her walls. The option is available to explore the house, but it is not required. If she enters the living room, she can watch a short, animated cartoon. Checking on Melody, she comments that he won’t eat. After writing in her diary about her missing parents, she goes to sleep.

Lonely Girl dreams about going to school, where she has no friends, instead finding comfort in her drawings.

### Day 2

The next day, Melody stopped moving. Lonely Girl must explore the house this day, but she will not go outside. She knocks on her parents’ door, and seeing that they are not home, decides to search the house. She finds that the reclining chair in their living room has been replaced. After inspecting it, leaving the room will cause her to encounter, a mysterious demon man, who vanishes after talking to her. If she attempts to watch television, she will receive an eye staring back at her. Additionally, the radio in the kitchen will only play a loud static noise. She writes in her diary again before sleeping.

This time, she has a dream with a demon desperately asking for help. It reaches its hand out towards Lonely Girl, growing claws and ending the dream with a screaming sound.

### Day 3

The next day, she gathers the courage to go outside, and sees her world breaking apart, while Zera observes the chaos. He is amused by the destruction but warns her not to go into the white void.

Back inside the house, she writes in her diary, sleeps, and has another dream of the girl from her drawings, the eye from the television staring at her, and Zera, until he appears. After being asked who she is, a Yoki turns towards the camera, opening her ears to reveal two eyes, ending the dream.

### Day 4

The next morning, Lonely Girl wakes up to find out that the inside of her house is being torn apart just like the outside is. Searching every room for her parents, she finds a doll in the kitchen.

**NOTE**: Players can pick up, refuse, or ignore the doll. Picking it up unlocks the Bonus Room, leaving it triggers the "Worst End", and ignoring it has no effect.

After exploring every accessible room, she decides to enter her parents‘ room as a last resort. Inside, she finds no trace of her parents except a diary left by her mother stating her goodbyes to Lonely Girl. Optionally, she can explore the room more and find torn pages from her mother’s journal that are readable in the Bonus Room.

As she attempts to hide in her bedroom, she encounters Zera for the final time, who reveals that her parents are gone from her world, and that there is a chance to save them by traveling to the Other World. However, in doing so, she will also lose all ties to her original World, including her memories of her parents.

## Endings

### Bad End #1: Shatter

If she does not heed this warning and continues anyway, the girl decides to go into the void. The animation cutscene shows a girl walks through the white void, but until seconds later, the screen shatters and exit the game.

### Bad End #2: Stay

If she stays in the house, Zera bids his goodbye to her and leaves. The girl is now left alone to die, apologizing to her parents for not being as strong as they thought she was.

### Worst End

"Leaving the doll" is an option will lead you directly to her parent's room, entering into the black void and nothing else inside from the room; except Sei, a monstrous being appears and slowly turn around to her, leads to attacking her by forming herself drastically into a hellish appearance.

### Good End

If she agrees to leave, Zera opens a door into the Other World. Bidding her last goodbye to her parents and Melody in this world, she enters the door and form herself as a monster like her drawings did, as depicted in the sequel.

**NOTE**: In fact, Melody is still alive as "a giant serpent" in the sequel, lives in a cave with her.

## Characters

She describes herself in the first day's diary entry as pathetic, cowardly, and alone. She is very shy; she will refuse to leave her house during the first two days, and, as shown in the day one dream, prefers drawing over talking to others at school. She cares deeply about her parents and her pet snake, Melody.
While most of Yoki's personality is unknown, she often appears aloof and distant, usually maintaining the same expression.
Temmie appears dancing inside the Bonus Room, and provides the player answers to their questions. Additionally, the player can choose the option "You must be eliminated. Begone." Temmie will become confused, then disappear in a similar way to Zera.
She also appears in Escaped Chasm 2, the "parody" project hidden in the Escaped Chasm's folder. She is shown dancing on a scrolling background of her face.

## Development

Temmie Chang developed the character sprites and tile design for her game solely in only five months, alongside with Fox and James Roach, whom she has worked together with on previous works like *Homestuck* and *Hiveswap*, as "composers" for the soundtrack of the game. She also worked alongside RPG Maker veteran and Visustella developer Archeia Nessiah, whom she worked together with for two games as a bitmap font programmer using the RPG Maker MV engine.

The game was released on April 3, 2019, Chang's birthday, via Itch.io.

## Sequel

She developed a "mock-up" sequel that included inside the original game's folder, located in the "Extras" folder alongside the guide and concept art. When the game is started, it shows Temmie dancing while a repeating background of her face scrolls up and to the left and the Bonus Room theme plays faster.

An indirect sequel, *Dweller's Empty Path*, also named as *Escaped Chasm 2*. Most characters from the original game reprised the role, except Yoki and Lonely Girl are "role-reverse", the former serves as the main playable character while the latter only appeared in different role as a minor playable character under her name **Woof**.

## Trivia

* Temmie originally stated to make her game in Gamemaker Studio like Toby Fox did, but it later shifted to RPG Maker due to lack of high-programming skills in the game engine.

## References

1. ↑ Template:Cite magazine
2. ↑ Tarason, Dominic (April 2, 2019). Escaped Chasm is a short, sad, free story by Undertale's artist.
3. ↑ Dale, Laura (April 9, 2019). Escaped Chasm is a Free Game By Undertale Artist Temmie Chang.
4. ↑ Bailey, Dustin (April 3, 2019). Free games: Undertale artist Temmie Chang has released her own RPG.
5. ↑ Lada, Jenni (July 11, 2020). Undertale Artist Temmie Chang Releases Dweller's Empty Path.
6. ↑ Glagowski, Peter (April 3, 2019). Undertale artist releases free game Escaped Chasm.