The Easiest Adventure Map™ is a satirical jab at the Minecraft Let's Play community. It makes fun of unprepared players who prefer easy, shallow adventure maps rather than deeper effort-full maps. It has two routes: a "Lazy" route, where you complete all the witch's challenges, and the "Real" route, where you fail all the witch's challenges, but get to escape the machine you're trapped in.
This map contains examples of:
- Addressing the Player: The player plays as... themselves. At least, so they think. They actually play as a professor who got trapped in the Atilliary Facilities.
- A Glitch in the Matrix: It's used throughout the Real Ending route, but the escape sequence stands out the most. Many doors that lead to nowhere, blocks stacked into (seemingly) infinity, floating blocks, blocks vanishing and reappearing, and random garbled walls of many blocks replacing normal walls, upon other things. The entire sequence is heavily based on glitchy Minecraft features, such as the since-removed Far Lands, where blocks also stacked randomly to infinity, and chunk errors to the void.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: It is revealed that the witch is actually part of a larger program designed you entrap you forever.
- All There in the Manual: There is a chest behind you when you start the map telling you to fail the witch's challenges before you even meet the witch.
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Anti-Climax Boss: Played for Laughs in the lazy ending. You can even choose not to fight the witch in the lazy ending. - A Winner Is You: The lazy ending uses this to mock the player, giving them an abrupt and underwhelming ending to the plot.
- Backtracking: Played straight while escaping the broken matrix. You see familiar areas such as the bedroom and the first and third chamber.
- Box-and-Stick Trap: The witch resorts to this in the boss fight, with signs next to the pressure plates saying "STEP ON THE WOOD". (Normally there is only "SHOOT" on these signs.)
- Brick Joke: One of the rooms in the glitchy escape is a copy of the ten-lever-code room, but instead every wall of the room is covered in levers, even the floor and ceiling.
- Casual Danger Dialog: The witch switches between being a Large Ham to being extremely awkward often, most notably in the introduction sequence. The player also responds in a similiar awkward manner, speaking in lowercase and showing complete disinterest in the whole plot.
- Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: The witch does this if you refuse to press the button/kill her during the real route.
- Continuity Nod: The real ending takes place right after the events of Atilliary Facilities 2, and shows the extent of the destruction. Some lava pits are dried up, and the dead body of Ashton Mault can be found. It also shows that SADOS was in fact covering up the dead body of Ashton Mault, which explains why it is covered up in the first map (which happens much much later).
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: A removed ending was to include leaving the witch's lair and buying some milk next door, avoiding the whole scene. It was changed into a Glitch in the Matrix.
- Cryptically Unhelpful Answer: "There is no milk" being written in binary in the first book.
- Death Course: Complete with BottomlessPits and Le Parkour and The Maze. But they're all harmless, so it's really Played for Laughs.
- Easter Egg: The player's wardrobe contains a secret pressure plate that lets them kill the Witch and reach the escape sequence earlier.
- Evil Is Hammy: The Witch is very hammy, even when she's trying to keep you from going Off the Rails.
- Exact Words: The map advertises two different endings, which is true; you can choose to either kill the Witch or spare her, though the endings you get are very similar. Or, you can choose to escape the Lotus-Eater Machine you're trapped in, reaching the real ending.
- Exploiting the Fourth Wall: Actually used as a game mechanic. You have to fail every test, and failing most tests requires you to jump into the void and die. You're meant to do that.
- Expository Gameplay Limitation: Lampshaded in the intro, where the player can only walk on the light tiles towards the literal cutscene trigger. The witch teleports in front of you, just out of reach, just for the sake of exposition.
- Fate Worse than Death: The lazy ending implies that you keep reliving the same adventure again and again.
- Finally Found the Body: Since this map follows the events of Atilliary Facilities 2, the dead body of Ashton Mault can be seen in the same place where he died, complete with burnt skull and torn lab coat.
- Foreshadowing: From the start of the map, there are some hints that the map takes place in Atilliary Facilities. First, the wardrobe contains the same syntax as the many test chambers in Atilliary Facilities, and identical to the Virtual Reality rooms of the prequel. There is also a split-second scene in front of the house that shows that the house is labled with "AF". In the real route, there is the appearances of the Virtual Reality machine itself appearing twice without being explained. In the glitch escape sequence, you pass through the same virtual reality hallways from the prequel (albeit corrupted).
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: A bunch happen when you're being teleported around after pressing the dank memes button. You get alternative views of areas you've visited and yet to visit, along with out-of-boundary views of the redstone of the map, but it happens very quickly.
- Harmless Villain: The witch. Even in the boss fight, she doesn't do anything to you at all. If you pass at least one of the trials and then refuse to kill the witch, she'll remove the TNT and congratulate you for passing the other tests, giving you your milk back and even offering you a ride home. Subverted in the secret Wardrobe route, where she actually tries to attack you in the maze. (She attacks like any other Minecraft witch.)
- Hit Me, Dammit!: The witch invokes this and gets upset when you refuse, especially if you've failed every other trial beforehand.
- Insane Troll Logic: The witch wants you to push the button so that you get the lazy ending. She says this if you have failed every other trial and she is about to snap:Witch: You can push the button because I said you can not.
- Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Hilariously played with in the level design of the escape sequence. You pass by a fence that you can not climb and spend five minutes parkouring and perfecting slime block jumps… only to find out that you've come full circle to where you've started, except now you're on the same fence, but now you're able to progress right next to where you began.
- Jump Scare: There is a scene in the real ending route where the player has failed five tests in a row, and suddenly a lot of weird garbled text shows talking about errors. Suddenly, the player gets teleported around the whole map repeatedly, even out of bounds and in the air, all the while the chatbox is getting spammed with error messages talking about chunk errors and trying to remove the player's files. The player then ends up in a room that is spazzing out and changing color constantly before the floor gives way and the player falls into the void. There is no warning for any of this.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: The player is trapped in a machine generating a fake world, similarly to the one SadOS uses on you in the Atillary Facilities maps.
- Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: A witch stole the milk in your fridge and you have to pass her weird Minecraft challenges to get it back.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The player has to break the whole environment by failing every test, making the environment very dangerous and unstable. But Thou Must! to get the real ending.
- Nightmare Retardant: Some parts of the map try to be frightening, but pull it off very poorly, such as the Pumkin man.
- No Fair Cheating: When finishing the lazy ending, the area that teleports to the real ending is removed. Literally.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The map starts off as very lighthearted, with the clumsy Witch guiding you throughout the way. However, the real ending causes you to glitch out the whole system, causing everything to change. The witch falls into the void, and you're stuck in large rooms of corrupted data which you're just running across. No dialogue, nothing happens. You can find signs with strange comments like "THERE IS NO MILK", "ALL PARTICIPANTS ARE TO WIN", and "DANGER", and everything generally stops making sense.
- Pacifist Run: You can spare the witch in the lazy ending by passing at last one of the tests before refusing to kill the witch at the end. The witch will remove the TNT and offer you a ride home, and give you the milk. You still get the same lazy ending, though.
- Poke the Poodle: The witch starts off by stealing your milk. Lampshaded by the download page that purposefully exaggerates that the witch has stolen something important from you.
- Railroading: Played with. The Witch obviously railroads you to pass each trial, to the point where you can just move forwards to win the map without any effort. It is also played straight in that there are only two paths: pass each test or fail each test, with the two endings.
- Reading Ahead in the Script: An interesting player example. There is a book at the start of the map explaining to avoid the witch's trials. Except... the witch hasn't even appeared yet.
- Room Full of Crazy: The floating signs in the glitchy escape sequence.
- Self-Parody: The Easiest Adventure Map™ is not easy at all. The first book inside the map also refers to itself.
- Stealth Sequel: To the creator's earlier Atilliary Facilities maps.
- The Door Slams You: An open door closes in your face in the escape route. There isn't even anything beyond that door.
- Unconventional Formatting: The Witch uses normal white text to speak, but uses bold red text sometimes when angered. The error messages also get pretty wacky with this, going all-out Zalgo.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: It is possible to get yourself stuck inside the hedgemaze by abusing its self-changing feature. It wasn't intended, and you have to switch to creative/survival mode to get out.
- Unwinnable by Design: A gameplay mechanic example of this appears. Consider that you have to fail each test. Once you pass even one of the tests, even if you've failed all the others, all the ways to fail are instantly removed. You're permanently set to the lazy route and you might not even realize until it's too late. Also counts as a Point of No Return.
- Villainous Breakdown: As you fail more and more of the Witch's tests, the Witch becomes increasingly aggressive and less funny.
