Escape Dungeon is a series of Hentai roguelites by Hide Games, the first of which was released in 2020. Its plot follows the fall of Sundista, a kingdom staffed by a statistically improbable amount of young, attractive women. As the demon lord Qaron enjoys the fruits of his conquest, La Résistance fights against his army of monsters, losing in the fashion you might expect.
Or winning. Or losing and then winning with the assistance of bullshit time magic. It's more confusing than it sounds.
This series includes the following tropes:
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: The plot demands that characters cannot masturbate without toys. Yes, you did just read that sentence.
- Always Chaotic Evil: Shunral overhears several conversations between goblins, rats, etc., which are just as puerile and cruel as you would expect. It's subverted with the orcs (who Shunral thought might choose to fight for good) and the mummies (who aren't in control of their actions)—which is not to say they're sympathetic, given how openly evil their chosen master is.
- Amazon Brigade: The protagonists are powerful women, including Court Mage Shalith, dreaded assassin Shunral, captain of Sundista's royal guard Fiara, and the magical Queen Illy herself. All of them are capable of killing dozens of mooks.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Game over scenes can be unlocked for later viewing without actually having to experience that game over via losing to a specific enemy, which is helpful for weaker or less common enemies.
- In the first game, most scenes can be unlocked by beating the game on normal difficulty, and the rest by beating it on hard difficulty.
- In the second game, scenes can be unlocked by spending Death Coins earned by defeating the relevant type of enemy, and every scene except the escape scenes can be unlocked by winning or losing the game a total of 12 times.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: Shunral's Piercing Shot skill ignores enemy armor values.
- Big Good: Queen Illy, who's responsible for the game's retry mechanic by... getting an orgasm. See Sex Magic below.
- Bishōnen Line: For someone who is the Big Bad, Qaron is quite the Hunk. Gets inverted in the second game, where Qaron is a hulking giant who progressively looks more and more monstrous every time he dies.
- Bittersweet Ending: In 2. Shunral has escaped, killing over a hundred soldiers on her way out, and discovered information vital to ending the war. But she's in for a long, grueling search for Illy, wasn't able to kill Qaron, and there's a non-zero chance he's following her right to La Résistance's hideout.
- Black Comedy Rape: A number of scenes throughout the games will have defeated heroines getting humiliated this way, especially those involving Laughably Evil Mooks and their Terms of Endangerment.
- Bottomless Magazines: Shunral never has to worry about running out of arrows
- Cast from Sanity: As discovered in 2, Qaron's Resurrective Immortality takes such a toll on his mind that Shunral's repeated kills turn him into a Ax-Crazy berserker lusting after the elf.
- Clothing Damage: The lower a protagonist's health drops, the more ragged her clothing. Protagonists on the brink of defeat are completely nude, and in most cases, even if they recover their hitpoints, the clothing does not regenerate (though sometimes a chest will contain a change of clothes).
- Court Mage: Shalith, in service to Queen Illy.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: The world is a Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting, so it has several game-specific norms. For example, criticizing someone's choices (or perceived choices) in the Point Build System is a serious insult.
- Dem Bones: The second game introduces skeletons as an enemy. Shunral notes that they have one more bone than is standard in human anatomy.
- A Dog Named "Dog": Most of the Mooks that have dialogue are named after their race.
- Don't Go in the Woods: The Misty Forest, where elves and demonkind first originated and the third game is set. It rapidly proves itself to be as dangerous as typical in a hentai setting.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect: Unlocking the Qaron Escape scene in the second game is arguably harder than the Beast Qaron Escape scene as it requires killing Qaron no more than five times (two of which are mandatory) over ten floors and it's easier and more consistent to set up a build that can quickly burst Qaron down in a turn or two than it is to set one up that can stall him and knock him back without killing him while still defeating the other various threats and make an escape without just killing him on each floor.
- First Installment Weirdness: The first game plays more like a proof-of-concept than later entries, with different terminology, a closer camera angle, and gameplay mechanics (like the inventory system) that aren't present in the sequels.
- Friendly Sniper: Shunral, the protagonist of Escape Dungeon 2.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: Qaron's species and origin are a mystery, although when the protagonists meet him, he's depicted with the purple skin, pale hair, and pointy ears of a dark elf.
- Full Health Bonus: Downplayed in that it's actually a full clothing bonus, but the "Complete" passive skill in the second game gives Shunral increasingly large amounts of attack and defense so long as her clothing is fully intact (which is essentially to say so long as her health has never dropped below half (or if it has, she's since found a change of clothing)).
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: How the games' heroines justify coming back from their defeats, being a power of Queen Illy via sexual orgasms. This is an adult game after all.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: Shalith's imprisoners did not confiscate her Magic Staff, or notice that the cell she was locked in had an escape tunnel dug by a previous inhabitant. Somewhat justified in that the goblin species is canonically very stupid, and the prison they were guarding nullified that staff's magic.
- Herd-Hitting Attack:
- Shalith's Fireball spell in the first game has an increasingly large area of effect for greater and greater amounts of damage on higher levels of the spell.
- Shunral has two such skills, Lightning Arrow, which hits an area centered on the targeted enemy, and Iron Rain, which hits an area centered on herself.
- Hitman with a Heart: Shunral assassinates exclusively evil targets, of which there are a lot in the setting. Her personality is very preoccupied with killing as a result, but firmly heroic.
- Interrupted Intimacy: In the second game's demo, one of the developers pauses a rape scene to suggest to the offending goblin that he buy the full game.
- Keystone Army: The demon lord Qaron is the one holding all the disparate monster races together. This forms the crux of Shunral's plan: assassinate the leader and leave the monsters in disorganized chaos. But when she does assassinate Qaron, things do not go as planned.
- Kleptomaniac Hero: Shalith's automatic pickup of anything she finds is justified (one, she's a prisoner who needs every advantage she can get, and two, the enemies' loot is entirely ill-gained), but she's unnervingly gleeful about it.Shalith: There's something shiny~ Crystals! Mine!
- Laughably Evil: A lot of the minions you find are Chaotic Stupid as much as they are Always Chaotic Evil, goblins and cyclops being the stand-outs.
- Live Item: In the first game, breakable items have a chance of containing a bug (?) that squirms...inside Shalith and gives her an orgasm every six turns or so, preventing whatever action she's ordered to do on that turn. It provides absolutely no benefits (to Shalith, at least) and even takes up an inventory slot; fortunately, it leaves after some time.
- Locked in the Dungeon:
- The situation Shalith finds herself in for the first game; subverting this is her objective and the point of the series' title.
- The second game has Shunral Exploring the Evil Lair of Qaron as an inversion of Shalith's situation, although the trope is played straight if she ever gets defeated. By the end where she's being chased by an Ax-Crazy Qaron though, she's booking it out too.
- The Magnificent: Parodied. Shunral (the Silver Wolf) knows that the first part of her epithet is because of her hair colour. She doesn't know why they added the "Wolf" part.
- Mayfly–December Romance: The elf queen Illy married the human Raleven, knowing he would die long before her. Even Shunral, who admires her greatly, wonders what she was thinking.
- New Game Plus: Regardless of if a playthrough ends in victory or defeat, a core gameplay mechanic of the games is that character upgrades purchased with the game's currency persist across playthroughs. Winning on the first playthrough is virtually impossible, but eventually it becomes reasonable, and then eventually even trivial.
- One-Man Army: Shalith and Shunral, the respective lone heroines of the first and second games up against hundreds of Mooks, up to the Big Bad himself.
- Pinball Projectile: Shunral's Ricochet skill causes her arrows to bounce off their target and hit adjacent enemies. While situational, closely packed enemies can result in an arrow bouncing around several times and hitting each enemy multiple times.
- Point Build System: In all games, you are given a currency to collect (Crystals for the first Escape Dungeon, Memory Fragments for the second and upcoming third) that stays with you even after a failed run. This is used to upgrade your characters' stats—and unlock new skills in 2's case—making you stronger for the deeper parts of the dungeon you might (and likely expected to) have failed previously.
- Power-Up: Treasure chests contain health. No, not items that restore health, actual health points. It's not clear how that's even possible.
- Proud Merchant Race: The talking bipedal rats are obsessed with making money, possibly even moreso than they are with more prurient matters.
- Proud Warrior Race: The orcs are proud warriors with a broad Might Makes Right attitude and show a certain kind of respect for Shunral's strength.
- Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: The first game was largely bereft of dialogue and followed an escaped prisoner who sees a lot of other victims on her way out. The second had regular Black Comedy conversations, more outlandish sex scenes, and a proactive protagonist typical of fantasy stories.
- Resurrective Immortality: In the first game, Shalith has to kill Qaron in order to escape. Not only is he back none the worse for the wear in the second game when Shunral infiltrates the Demon City to assassinate him, but once she does, he gets back up as Shunral is leaving the floor and pursues her for the next ten floors even if he is killed every time, with killing him one more time being mandatory to escape the final floor. If he's killed at least five times, he becomes Beast Qaron, losing his pretty Bishōnen appearance and much of his mental faculties in favor of raw bulk and strength.
- Run or Die: In the first game, archer enemies cannot be killed unless Shalith possesses long-range magic scrolls or can back them into a corner. The only thing keeping them from making the game unwinnable is their lack of aggro—a sufficiently healthy Shalith can run past them, taking their hits if she needs to.
- Scratch Damage: Defense in the second game cannot fully negate attacks, with a single point of damage always getting through, even if the defender has more defense than the attacker has attack. This applies equally to Shunral and all the enemies. The shield skill, however, does allow full negation of attacks so long as even a single point of its defense boost is still active and Shunral's boosted defense is at least equal to the incoming attack.
- Sex Magic: Queen Illy possesses magic that lets her reverse time whenever she gets an orgasm. This power was vital to the war effort, so the untimely death of her husband caused quite a bit of trouble.
- Skewed Priorities: During the true ending of the second game, a group of rats who know they're no match for Shunral start talking about how they're really more about money than loyalty to Qaron and seem like they're going to be willing to change sides, possibly for money. Shunral gives them a minute to explain themselves and they start going on about how much money Shunral (and the rats) could make if she sold her body. Disgusted at them and disappointed in herself for thinking it might go differently, Shunral puts the rats down and gets back to putting distance between herself and Beast Qaron.
- Tactical Withdrawal: Upon learning that Qaron has Resurrective Immortality, Shunral recognizes that the situation has gone way above her pay grade and decides instead to Bring News Back to the Resistance. She still fully intends to kill him, but she needs to make that possible first.
- Trick Arrow: Most of Shunral's skills center around firing some manner of specialized arrow, such as a poisoned arrow or an explosive arrow.
- Unstable Equilibrium: The "Complete" passive skill can make Shunral very powerful and allow her to maintain an edge that makes it very easy to keep on winning, but if the she loses its effects, it's essentially a wasted passive and leaves her in a much worse place to try to regain her footing.
- You Can't Thwart Stage One: However many times Illy tries, she can't reverse the fall of Sundista.
