Conan Kill Everything

This is one of those games, like YOU HAVE TO BURN THE ROPE or Pick up the Phone Booth and Die, where the title could double as the walkthrough. Killing everything does entail a few very minor puzzles, but essentially you just do what it says on the box. Thoroughness is rewarded.

So it's not very ambitious. Is it fun? Yeah, more or less, but I found that the implementation wasn't quite smooth enough and I actually got hung up on stupid things midway through the game. You have to kill things in a specific order, and if you try to deviate from this order, the game won't let you go forward; since I had completely the wrong idea about how to solve one of the puzzles, this left me stuck for longer than the game really deserved.

Then, too, the humor wasn't quite to my taste. It's supposed to be broad, I realize, but the one-note joke had worn out well before the game ended.

A mildly entertaining 15-minute play with a single-premise joke - kill everything. It wasn't laugh-out-loud funny, but I enjoyed it enough for it to be memorable.

A game best described as one of those roadside games where you have to jump wooden pegs until you have one left. While it's possible to die early, it is also possible to get stuck in the middle. The game prevents you from making kills that may prevent later kills, which means you really can't get dead-ended. It also means you may be stalled without a clue on how to proceed.

Some of the puzzles infer a solution I couldn't apply, (Spoiler - click to show)as I kept trying to reach the torch to burn the wood golem; and others it seems where not enough clues are given in the descriptions to suggest an action, (Spoiler - click to show)like the table is killed not as you would think. Most of the solutions were obvious, but those last few unfortunately required a walkthrough. I would have liked a hint system.

Worth a short puzzle-solving playthrough.

Play it if: you've got a few minutes to kill and a few brain cells to waste.

Don't play it if: you want a bit more ambition in your IF than - well, almost nothing - and if you are easily enraged by the dumbing-down of the character of Conan as portrayed in external works.

A seemingly one-note joke of a game that actually does have a few puzzles, I'm not sure whether to praise Conan Kill Everything for keeping its admittedly simple premise brief, or wonder if a longer pastiche of the (now ubiquitous) dim-witted caricature of the character is in order.

But I won't be too picky. This is a fairly funny game, and the point of the joke is made. There are even some minor puzzles and a number of nice touches like Conan's reactions to kissing or cutting things. In sum, it's an OK time-waster.