Zest

There is an ending in which the player character becomes a preacher. I played this game when it came out, and I still think about the sermon he gives. I'm not religious, but it touches on something beautiful and real, and it's strange and a little sad to think that so few people will ever see it because they play through one path and think "ah, drugs."

Zest combines the talent of Richard Goodness (who later made the amusing and thoughtful Tombs of Reschette), lectroniae (a musical artist), and PaperBlurt (a frequent author of well-illustrated twine games).

In this rather long Twine game, you play as someone who works at some sort of fast food place, and can go to church or the tobacco shop to buy tobacco to 'zest'.

The game has a mix of the absurd, the mundane, and the thoughtful. You have 3 meters, including grossness, and you have to repeat the same options/tasks each day.

The game is at its most absurd in the store, or in dreams; its at its most thoughtful in its depiction of the poor, and of Christian prayers and sermons. And frequently it is both.

This game contains frequent use of the f-word.

This is the story of a stoner in a dead-end job, making their way through bizarre encounters and trying to find their path in life. It does have good, weird writing, an engaging hook and a pleasingly strange atmosphere.

The graphics are (intentionally?) bad. The religion isn’t really meaningful in the game, or I missed whatever point it was making. I tried visiting church every day and confessing, but it didn’t seem to make much impact.

The drugs however seem to be a focus of the game. The achievements are mostly (all?) to do with drug taking.

So I was really good, saved up $200 and bought the ultimate bong. I got high, went to work, got fired, went to work for the head shop. End game.

The presentation of the text is often too slow for me. After the fifth time of getting the same shower monologue it wears really thin. I think the author has misjudged this one – getting the same long slow text presentation is not bad once, however if you play for more than a few days game time, you get the same monologue several times and it is no longer engaging. I quit while having to wait for a lengthy monologue from a scammy psychic, which seemed to go on and on and on.

I like achievements, and I’d have liked to get them all. That needs a lot of replaying the game which is tedious when the text is so slow. It’s unfortunate as it would otherwise appeal to my urge to get all the things.

It looks like you can try to inject or snort zest, and also find an ending where you move back home. I’m not prepared to wade through all that slow text.