Ratings and Reviews by Karl Ove Hufthammer

You and Hitler are competing in a dance competition (!), and the whole gameplay consists of trying various dances (tango, boogie, morris dance, …), while Hitler counters with a different dance. The game implements a simple RPG-style hit point system, where either you or Hitler or both or none loses hit points after each dance. When either your or Hitler’s score reaches zero, that person loses.

Trying various dances is fun for the first few moves (pun intended), owing to some entertaining descriptions (e.g., ‘Hitler gets two steps into a quite passable rumba before remembering himself. He quickly pretends that he was just invading Poland.’), but quickly just becomes the tedious task of trying all dances in Wikipedia’s ‘List of dances’ – or at least the non-‘Western bourgeois abomination’ ones. An impressive number of dances are implemented, but many are not, and only a very few have custom descriptions. While the game doesn’t contain much real content (it was a Speed-IF entry, after all), the high number of hit points you and Hitler start out with actually makes the game feel too long and repetitive, and thus rather boring.

You’re at a new year’s party, standing near the refreshment table, and people keep coming up to you, asking for pretzels, cherry tomatoes or celery stalks. You can choose to give them what they want – whereby you win – or not – whereby you lose. This is not just a summary of the game; it’s basically the entire gameplay (though a mouse in the egg nog does make things (just) slightly harder). Oh, and one more thing: You’re Hitler. Nazi Mice is not a fun game, but thankfully it’s short. Not recommended.

This game was written for a Speed-IF competition, i.e., in a very limited amount of time, yet manages to have several puzzles and a coherent, if somewhat strange, story. But although the objectives of the puzzles are very clear, their solutions are not. The game usually left me feeling clueless about how to achieve the objectives, and finding the objects (and even locations) needed frequently happened by accident. I was stuck a few times, but found the ClubFloyd transcript very useful.

I played the first part of the original competition release, and then finished the second release of the game. The second release has a few more implemented objects (i.e., ‘examine [object]’ is more likely to give a response), but the game still feels extremely underimplemented, with lots of unimplemented verbs and nouns, and plenty of stock responses (even for ‘examine me’). Both versions have their share of grammar mistakes.

Although this is not a good game, it is not all bad. It does have three real puzzles, which is more than one would expect from a Speed-IF. And the game is quite humorous, with much of the humour coming from the absurdity of the various situations. You will probably find it more entertaining reading a transcript from a successful playthrough than trying to solve the puzzles yourself, though.