Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Narrative

• Universal
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Characterization
• Characters
• Characters As Device
• Dialogue
• Motifs
• Narrative Devices
• Paratext
• Plots
• Settings
• Spectacle

Genre

• Action Adventure
• Comedy
• Commercials
• Crime And Punishment
• Drama
• Horror
• Love
• News
• Professional Wrestling
• Speculative Fiction
• Sports Story
• War

Media

• Animation (Western)
• Anime
• Comic Book
• Fan Fics
• Film
• Game
• Literature
• Music And Sound Effects
• New Media
• Print Media
• Radio
• Sequential Art
• Tabletop Games
• Television
• Theater
• Videogame
• Webcomics

Topical Tropes

• Betrayal
• Censorship
• Combat
• Death
• Family
• Fate And Prophecy
• Food
• Holiday
• Memory
• Money
• Morality
• Politics
• Religion
• School

Other Categories

• British Telly
• The Contributors
• Creator Speak
• Creators
• Derivative Works
• Did Not Do The Research
• Language
• Laws And Formulas
• Show Business
• Split Personality
• Stock Room
• Trope
• Truth And Lies
• Truth In Television
• Weirdness Isolation

The characters are locked in, have no idea how they got there, why they're there, or how to get out, nor do they know exactly who is behind their predicament, if anyone.

The main thrust of such stories is the investigation of the restricted environment in which the characters find themselves, with the goal of mastering it, revealing its secrets, and eventually escaping. Often those approaching the truth are sharply yanked back.

May overlap with Alternate Universe, Planet Of Hats, Adventure Town or Lotus Eater Machine. Almost always employs Failure Is The Only Option and a veritable swarm of Schrodinger's Butterflies to obfuscate issues. There's usually a Nietzsche Wannabe in the cast.

The base plot of many a multifandom roleplay, often nicknamed 'spooky jamjar games'. The setting is a 'spooky jamjar'.

See also the Quest For Identity, where the main character doesn't even know who he is. A subtrope of the Driving Question. Often spawns an Escape From The Crazy Place. Some are examples of Beautiful Void. Some fans may want it to Leave The Plot Threads Hanging. See also Heart Of Darkness, when the characters do know how they got there, and now they need to find out what happened.

A variation of Driving Question.

Compare Epiphanic Prison.

Truth in Television, to the dismay of many.

---

Examples

Anime

• Megazone 23
• The Big O, where the whole city is in this situation.
• Ergo Proxy has plenty of these, though only in individual episodes (e.g. 11, 14, 15, and 19)
• Gantz
• Haibane Renmei: the precise nature of the town of Glie is left mysterious throughout, and although there is a way for the Haibane to leave, it's never clear where they go or how, leading to speculation among fans that Glie is an allegory for Purgatory, or that it is Purgatory.
• Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer
• Kaiba

Comic Books

• Fleep, possibly the ultimate Ontological Mystery; one person, in a phone booth, sealed in concrete.
• Final Crisis Aftermath: Escape has a number of characters from The DCU's espionage community trapped in a dreamlike "Electric City" with no idea how they got there.

Film

• Waking Life (the entire movie revolves around attempts by the protagonist to wake up from a possibly terminal dreamstate)
• Cube, and its sequel Hypercube.
• Dark City
• Saw
• Groundhog Day
• Identity
• The Exterminating Angel
• The Fountain - portrays existence on this earth as an ontological trap that can only be escaped through death. The protagonist refuses to accept this and, having eaten from the bark of the mythical tree of life at the fountain of youth, becomes doomed to outlive the rest of humanity, trapped in a spaceship on the edge of a dying star.
• Paycheck, which really isn't surprising since it's based on a Philip K Dick book.
• Eden Log
• Pandorum, which bears more than a few similarities to Eden Log.

Literature:

• The Jorge Luis Borges short story "The Library of Babel" describes a universe consisting of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival, and four walls of bookshelves where you can find very book ever written or to be written.
• In the HP Lovecraft short-story "The Outsider" a man has lived his whole life in a dark castle beneath an all-enclosing forest that blocks out the sky. Yet, he feels strangely that he has not always been there...
• In William Sleator's House of Stairs, five teenagers wake up in the titular House of Stairs. It's a giant complex of interlocking stairs and platforms, but none of the stairs lead out, they only connect to other parts of the maze.
• Issola: A couple of people our hero considered completely indestructible have gone missing. Not even Sethra Lavode, who very much deserves her Shrouded In Myth status, can find them by herself. She, does, however, know how to get Vlad there, and he arrives to find his two incredibly Bad Ass friends stuck in apparently unbreakable, seamless chains in an empty room with no exits that appears to be on another planet. The plot hinges on figuring out how the hell the bad guys managed it, and why.
• Minotaur (Minotavr), a Russian novel
• In the Dungeon series, beings from all times and spaces are brought to a nine-leveled artificial prison called the Dungeon. At no point in the series is the Dungeon's origins, masters or purpose made clear, only speculated on.
• House of Leaves
• Ilium by Dan Simmons comes close, even though it spans three planets rather than a room. The mystery is just what has happened between our time and this imaginary far future to make the latter so bizarre. For a start, where did all those Greek gods using advanced technology and living on Mars come from? The characters on Earth in particular take their condition as a mystery to be solved and try to escape the definite confines that are set upon them even as they are able to teleport around the world freely.

Live Action TV

• Lost
• The Langoliers
• 1977's Fantastic Journey
• Land Of The Lost
• The Prisoner
• Life On Mars
• Star Trek The Original Series had several episodes based on or employing this subgenre.
  • The original pilot, "The Cage"
  • "The Empath"
  • "The Mark of Gideon"
• Star Trek The Next Generation: "Allegiance"
  • "Remember Me"
  • "Cause and Effect"
  • "The Next Phase"
  • "Frame of Mind"
• The Twilight Zone, "Five Characters in Search of an Exit", "Stopover in a Quiet Town," and the pilot episode "Where is Everyone?", among others.
• Doctor Who, "Bad Wolf", where the Doctor and Rose participate in a Deadly Game Show.
  • And "The Mind Robber" from the classic series.
• Day Break
• In 1969 NBC aired an hour long teleplay about a man trapped in a cube, wondering what was real and what wasn't. It was written and directed by Jim Henson of all people in a very un-Muppety not-played-for-laughs kind of way.
• Nowhere Man - Of the Loss Of Identity variety.

RealLife

• The Ontological Mystery genre is usually a metaphor for Real Life on some or other level.

Theatre

• No Exit, probably one of the most famous examples.
• Waiting for Godot
  • Endgame also, with a Just Before The End flavor to it.
• The Trial
• Six Characters in Search of an Author is Luigi Pirandello's way of making the theater itself into an Ontological Mystery.

Video Games

• An entire genre of web games, the "escape-the-room game", is based on this, with the player being trapped in a room and having to search the whole place for items in order to get out. It typically starts with some Easy Amnesia to explain why the player doesn't know how they got into the room. Examples include Crimson Room and its sequel Viridian Room, and Mystery of Time and Space.
• Myst is probably one of the most famous examples of this. Interestingly, the rest of the series avoids the trope except for ''End of Ages''.
  • Another is The 7th Guest.
• Portal, a unique all-puzzle Gaiden Game for Half Life.
• Neku in The World Ends With You, and technically any Player who bet their memories on winning the Reapers' Game.
• 5 days a Stranger from the Chzo Mythos series.
  • Twelve Thirteen by the same author.
• Planescape: Torment can be seen as an example of what happens when someone makes a 50+ hour epic out of this trope.
• The Neverhood begins with our hero Klaymen trapped in a room (see above) with no information, and goes from there.
• eXperience112 (The Experiment in America), the player is trapped in a control room with no memory how he got there. Notable in that you do not leave the room - you use its controls to manipulate another character into solving puzzles for you.
• In Eternal Sonata, Frederick Chopin views all of the events that transpire in the game as nothing more than a dying dream. Finding out whether or not that's true is a major element to the story.
• Cave Story
  From somewhere, a transmission...
• Kagetsu Tohya, slightly subverted. Shiki isn't allowed to remember the incident that got him stuck in an endless repetition of days. If he could remember Arcueid knocking him out accidentally, Len's nature and the oddly flexible ways he spends his days, he'd figure it out in about three days otherwise. Everyone in the dream is prevented from thinking about the differences between Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Because he's the one the dream is focused on plus his MEoDP he's the only one to realize that there's something wrong at all, and initially it's almost entirely unconscious. Eventually, he figures out that the little girl is the one doing everything. It's not entirely clear how accurate the details were inside but it seems that the other people were indeed real, sort of.
• the white chamber: You wake up in a coffin on a space station. You can leave, but you'll die of asphyxiation.
• Theresia for the DS fits this perfectly, with the main character slowly regaining her memories throughout the game, and the house is filled with deadly traps.
• Silent Hill 4: The Room - the only chapter in the series in which the protagonist didn't willingly enter.
• This style is one of the oldest computer games: Adventure, originally copyright 1973; Adventures in 4 dimensions, originally copyright 1979, updated in the early 90's; and The Count which was originally written for the TRS-80, which was only sold from 1977 to 1981.

Webcomics

• The Ends has as a central plot element the question of whether the inhabitants really exist or are simply living out a self-inflicted hell created when they blew themselves up in a nuclear apocalypse.

Web Original

• Ruby Quest, an interactive, multiplayer story, as played on 4Chan.
• The Strangerhood uses this as its main point combined with a hint of Laser Guided Amnesia.

Western Animation

• Twelve Ounce Mouse (Possibly... who really knows what that show is about?!?)

---