Edna & Harvey: The Breakout - Television Tropes & Idioms

Edna: Is Dr. Marcel still after us?

Harvey: Who cares? Let’s burn something!

— The German cover

Edna Konrad wakes up in a padded room. She doesn’t remember how she got there — in fact, she doesn’t remember much of anything — but she knows that she is being wrongfully imprisioned. After all, she is completely sane — a fact to which her talking rag doll rabbit, Harvey, can attest. Harvey has another remarkable ability: When he is shown things that remind him of Edna’s childhood, he can “tempomorph” her into the past — or rather, her recollection of the past — where she not only finds out about her life before the stay at the asylum, but also (re-)learns abilities that help her escape from the asylum.

This is the basic premise of Edna & Harvey: The Breakout (Edna bricht aus in the original German release), a 2008 low-budget Adventure Game (though it didn’t come out in the US and UK until 2011) that started life as a dissertation on the topic The Computer Game as a Non-Linear Narrative Form. Despite its 2D graphics and classic verb interface, it turned out to be a huge hit and won many awards.

Had a spin-off titled Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes in 2011. The release date of the English version is unknown.

Tropes featured in this game include (spoilers ahoy!):

Adventure Game
Air Vent Passageway
Art Shift: The portraits in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue are drawn in a much more realistic style than the rest of the game.
Art Style Dissonance
Author Insertion: One of the patients is a game designer who went crazy when he tried to make a classical point-and-click adventure in a matter of months with only a handful of co-workers, drawing more than one hundred backgrounds and all the animations while at the same time writing his dissertation.
The Bad Guy Wins: One of the possible endings.
"Blind Idiot" Translation: Unfortunaly, this game suffers quite a bit from this.
- Most infamously, a kite is called a “dragon.” This is because the German words for these things a similar (“Drache” and “Drachen,” respectively.) Why the translator thought the game features a dragon is anyone’s guess.
  - This error has been fixed for the special edition.
- Similarly, a bench is labled as “bank.” (Both are called “Bank” in German.) Once again, there is no bank in the game.
- When Edna is asked by Aluman how she plans to get through the main gate, she can answer, “We’ll build a hot air balloon from styrofoam and just float out of here.” Aluman treats this as a perfectly reasonable and obvious solution, explains why it still won’t work, and concludes with (translated correctly from German): “You’ll have to come up with a less obvious solution.” However, this joke went right over the translator’s head, so he turned the phrase into into its exact opposite, “You’ll have to think of something less far-fetched,” thereby completely ruining the joke.
- When Edna tells Mr. Frock (who thinks he is an article of clothing) that he has a strange name, he anwers in the English version: “It is meant for a human.” This, of course, doesn’t make any sense. What he actually says is, “Maybe for a human.”
- Edna is told that Dr. Marcel locks himself in a room on the second floor every day. The room is actually on the third floor. This mistranslation happened because the translator didn’t know that the US use a different system to number floors. In German, the first floor is not the same as the ground floor, but the one above it. So a German second floor is an American third floor.
- To name a few…
  - It’s particularly sad that some other translations (like French and Italian) are based on the flawed English one rather than the German original.
Brain in a Jar: Bobo
Breaking the Fourth Wall: Happens occasionally.
Brick Joke: The epilogue to one of the endings explains that, after breaking out, Hoti became a bank robber who turned himself in after accidentally shooting a bank teller. The epilogue of the other ending says that Moti returned to the asylum and was released shortly after because he no longer suffered from the delusion of being Hoti’s siamese twin. He accepted a job as a bank teller and was shot on his second day.
Chekhov's Boomerang: During the course of the game, you learn how to copy a key. An ability that comes in handy more than once.
Chick Magnet: Drogglejug, due to the informed attributes described below. Even Edna has a crush on him.
Companion Cube/Consulting Mister Puppet: Harvey, though the player can hear him talk.
Covers Always Lie: Edna doesn’t simply walk away from the asylum as is shown on the cover, and Dr. Marcel doesn’t simply stand behind her, ineffectively waving his arms.
The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: You can use everything with everything and even talk to inanimate objects (besides Harvey). The only way to do something that doesn't result in a custom response is finding a bug that allows you to do something that wasn’t meant to be possible. The default responses aren’t even voiced because they weren’t meant to be triggered.
Dialogue Tree
Digital Distribution: Apart from being sold in stores, the game can also be downloaded here.
Downer Ending: The game has two endings. In one, Dr. Marcel, the head of the asylum, succeeds with his evil plan to erase Edna’s personality and replace it with a new one. In the other, Edna kills Dr. Marcel, after which it is implied that she died escaping from the police. Fortunately, Harvey's New Eyes and its ending sadly confirm this. It also turns out that Dr. Marcel isn’t dead, after all.
Dummied Out: See here.
Genki Girl: Petra.
The Great Repair: One of the many things you have to do in order to escape the asylum is repair a vehicle. And then you don’t even use it.
I Can't Reach It: Played for Laughs. A copy of the master key with which Edna could easily leave the asylum is displayed in the arts and crafts room as an artwork, but she refuses to take it with her so as to not destroy the art.
- Another example: One puzzle requires you to connect headphones to a tape deck and bring the other end to a person who is too far away from the tape deck for the wire to reach. Edna refuses to simply pick up the tape deck because “[i]t isn’t a Walkman.”
Informed Attribute: Again, Played for Laughs. Drogglejug is described as a well-read intellectual who is witty in conversation and seems rough on the outside, but is actually sensitive on the inside, when he is just some weird-looking guy who can only say his own name.
The Killer In Me: Edna finds out that she committed the murder for which her father was executed.
- This may be a result of the translation, but as there is no death penalty in Germany, Edna’s father just “died in prison.”
  - I don’t know which translation you played, but in my English version the article over Dr. Marcel’s fireplace says that Edna’s father was sentenced to death.
  - The translation is not at fault. The German version explicitly states that Edna’s father was executed.
The King Of Town: Adrian, king of the recreation room. He resides in a cushion castle and earned his title by winning a game of Yahtzee.
Kleptomaniac Hero
Large Ham: King Adrian, particularly in the German version.
Laser-Guided Amnesia
Mind Screw: Lampshaded in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
“The player never figured out what hit him.”
Missing Mom: Edna doesn’t seem to have a mother, a fact that is important to the plot but never brought up or explained.
Mood Whiplash: The game starts out as a light-hearted comedy about an eccentric girl trying to escape from an insane asylum and the oddball characters she meets there. Towards the end of the game, it suddenly gets a whole lot darker.
Multiple Endings
Neat Freak: Mr. Frock
Ontological Mystery
Pixel Hunt: Averted. Like in Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2, you can highlight all the hotspots in a room by pressing the space bar. This didn’t stop certain game reviewers from complaining about pixel-hunting because they didn’t Read the Freaking Manual. They spin-off avoids this by mentioning the feature in the tutorial.
Pokémon Speak: Drogglejug
Power Born of Madness: At one point of the game, you can write onto the moon. Edna says she can do this because she is “completely gaga.”
Psychic Powers: Adrian, king of the recreation room, can see into the future ever since he was struck by lightning.
Red Herring: There are at least two things in the game that you can pick up, but are entirely useless.
Sadistic Choice: The player is presented with one right at the end of the game.
Self-Made Orphan: Indirectly and unintentionally. Edna committed the murder for which her father took the blame and was subsequently sentenced to death. What happened to Edna’s mother is anyone’s guess.
Shout Out: Edna’s ragdoll rabbit is called Harvey.
- Also, quite a few references to the Monkey Island series.
Siamese Twins: Hoti and Moti. However, they’re actually two men (with different skin colors) wearing one big sweater.
Strange Girl: Edna
Stripperiffic: During the entire game, excepting flashbacks, Edna wears only a hospital gown and a very tight-fitting pair of panties.
Talking Is a Free Action: Lampshaded by Mr. Frock:
“I have the […] feeling that time has slowed down while we were talking.”
Tomato in the Mirror: After having escaped from the asylum, Edna tries to prove that her father did not kill Dr. Marcel’s son. And succeeds — by finding out that she did.
Trauma Induced Amnesia: While Edna’s amnesia is mostly laser-guided, one specific memory is suppressed due to a trauma.
Twist Ending
Updated Rerelease: An optimized special edition playable in both German and English and with 18 unlockable achievements and audio commentary has been released.
What Could Have Been: One flashback and accompanying ability were cut from the final game: The graffito of Dr. Marcel in the basement was originally meant to remind Harvey of the time Edna learned to moonwalk — from Michael Jackson himself (who, apparently, was a talented graffiti artist, hence the connection). This ability would have been used later to sneak to Bladder’s van. However, since there was no way ensure the player finds the hotspot, this may have rendered the game potentially unwinnable, so it was scrapped.
"Where Are They Now?" Epilogue
Where The Hell Is Springfield?: Looking at a globe, Edna asks Harvey what country they live in, which is a very good question considering that it is a German-speaking country in which the death penalty is legal.
Widget Series: This is a Weird German Thing, after all.
You Wake Up in a Room