Reviews by DB

Game by up and coming ADRIFT author Mike Desert. Heavy uses of anti-mimetic writing and familiar stereotypes. Inclusion of illustrations and music may ameliorate these for some.

Not as funny as it wants to be. By hiding victory commentary in unpublished ALR, the game forces the player to have to "lose" arbitrarily, meaning the game commits the same errors it attempts to lampoon. Written as Speed-IF, and it shows.

The illustrator's younger brother supplied the initial "seed" for this story: the idea of a meat monster. He was at a time when he liked making up stories and wanted to write books, but only ever came out with rough ideas. I told him I would use an idea from him as the basis for one of my own stories, and this (plus puns) was the result.

Produced under EvenComp restrictions, it is only constraint and the game's ridiculously over-the-top delivery that make this one stand out to me, which is why I think it could take two stars instead of just one despite its being rather bad. The story strives to hit two extremes, of horror and humor (hoping to bring nuance to a "so bad it's good" shlock style), but fumbles its deepest horror element. The humor becomes sort of awkward next to an image of a man chopping a bloody fountain out of... something with a lot of blood in it. Ultimately the experience evens out somewhere around the level of simple gross-out shtick. Unfortunately, that's a fail for both horror and humor.

Still, some of the humor does manage to amuse me when I look back on it. The hyperbolically mean, old man makes me giggle. Who's really that mean? My favourite line is the one about The Stranger's name.

A work made without seriousness which maybe had more potential in it somewhere, but might still be worth a chuckle... or a squick?

Full disclosure: I thought I would upload this because I saw a poll for Worst IF Titles and figured this might garner a vote (two of its reviews from the ADRIFT Forum mention the quality of the title). Also, though I wasn't when this game was made, I've been a vegetarian for a while now.

A funny game at times, but tedious. I don’t know what I would think of Rybread if I hadn’t happened to play this game first. Certainly it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I also enjoy Ed Wood, so hey. It’s a good fit.

The writing is at its best lampooning literary criticism, doing unique or otherwise unvisualizeable things with language (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)“Room in the Shape of a Burning Credit Card”), or toying with notions of interactivity (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)playing with audience assumptions in the first interview scene). Those elements make Acid Whiplash recommendable. It could’ve done those things more frequently, though. Irritable players: use a walkthrough (I did).

Its non-sequitur humor gets stale quickly. Why did it have to include any mazes? I sort of wish the game just had a word you could type in to skip from one interview scene to the next.

I’ll be upfront: my personal experience probably biases my interpretation of this story in ways that maybe not everyone else can account for. Having taught English in Southeast Asia I have a special affinity for the scenes and characters crafted by Mr. Whittington in Love is as Powerful as Death, Jealousy is as Cruel as the Grave; they all seem just so much more real to me for having my actual experience there to which I can compare them, and ring true. I don’t wish to say that the game isn’t flawed -- it has its flaws -- but I do wish to emphasize that I think the narrative in this Cambodian ghost story stands far above any problems in its coding.

Could it use more polish? Maybe, but a strong story is already there and on the strength of it I still definitely recommend Love is as Powerful as Death.

On uploading the more recent executable version of this diversion onto IFDB, it strikes me that my original review was unduly masochistic. There is something interesting, I think, in the Mad Lib style construction of this piece. In particular, I had originally written it out of a desire to be able to answer the questions the voice over asks in "The Perfect Human"-- so there you have it, some reasoning. +1 star, little buddy.

Your mileage may vary from play-to-play, especially depending on who you are and how you approach the thing. Some have created surreal, even poetic, stabs at it, while I've seen others try to make it into AIF. I can't assert that there's really much of a right or wrong way to do it.

I'll end this with the same primary assertion as in my previous review: a short game, to be played for a quick break.