Renegade Brainwave

There have been a couple of polls over the years for 'games that need more reviews' and this has been on all of them. I loaded it up once a few years ago, but it seemed somewhat overwhelming.

But I'm glad I've finished it now!

This is a goofy, intentionally silly game in the vein of Escape from the Crazy Place. You are a police officer dressed as a Go Go dancer. Your partner is Donald McRonald: clown, pyromaniac, and overall goofy character.

The game map is split into about 9 main locations with a couple of extra ones. Gameplay revolves around bringing items from one area into another and getting Ronald to cooperate with you.

The plot is that something mysterious fell out the sky and crashed into the graveyard, and now so many of the dead and buried are rising up out their graves!

There is background music, which I thought was well-chosen; it felt like the soundtrack to one of those movies within a movie you see when people reference fake black and white horror films, like the werewolf movie in the Thriller music video. It has a lot more character than much of the music I've seen in other IF games.

However, I also found a lot of bugginess. The jelly doughnut was a major problem; I found it in a grave. I took it. Then I took something else in the grave, and it said I took the doughnut. I later gave the doughtnut to Donald, and it said he ate it, but then I still had it in my inventory. Similarly, the hints just went blank when first entered the (Spoiler - click to show)spacecraft. There were also a lot of interactions which may have been bugs and may have not; like when I opened my purse, and (Spoiler - click to show)tried to get something out and died, so I tried giving it to Ronald and told him to open it, then when I had it again I could take stuff out and not die, even though the boa was in there. Similarly, with the main nemesis, (Spoiler - click to show)I first tried doing nothing, and died; then breaking the machine, and died; then going through the light, and died; then talking, and that just gave a normal response. So I tried attacking the dog herself and got mind controlled away. So things were kind of chaotic. There are also several typos, mainly missing quotes when a sentence has a dialogue tag in the middle.

The characters and writing are funny and high quality, and the music really helps the ambiance. I enjoyed a lot of the puzzles, too. I wonder if that's why there are so few reviews; the game is good enough that no one would give it a 'this sucks, don't try this' review, but tricky enough to finish that people who like it often aren't able to see the end. However, I should note that as of writing this in April 2024, this game has a lot of 4-5 star ratings, while I'm giving it a 3-star rating, so my experience may be atypical.

OK, so you're a police officer. A cross-dressing police officer who likes the styles of the 60s. (And a werewolf, but that's not important.) And you have a sidekick: the creepy, giggling pyromaniac Donald McRonald, who is technically not a trademark violation. And you have a gun, which: "Sometimes you shoot folks with it, other times you just point it at folks." And a boa -- the constrictor sort, but that's really more of a deadly prank played by your fellow police officers than anything you can use.

And you are investigating a disturbance at the cemetery. A cemetery where the locals buried all the members of an "evil circus" that once terrorized the town, an incursion handily repelled by the trigger-happy constabulary to which you belong. And there are jelly doughnuts.

So... this is the kind of situation that, as a player, one has to embrace wholeheartedly in order to get any enjoyment out of the game. If the wacky, goofy, random and bizarre doesn't amuse you, then you may find yourself blinking in incomprehension at this enthusiastically off-beat work by J. J. Guest, noted author of To Hell in a Hamper. Personally, I found it to be about 90% amusing. There were some wrong notes that didn't jibe with my own sense of humor, but it was generally an entertaining and engaging short play experience. (Note that I played the expanded Inform 7 version, not the original ADRIFT version.)

However, I got really, really stuck. A lot. So much was going on in terms of joke delivery that it was almost hard to pay attention to what serves as the plot on a mechanical basis. Implementation is very spare with respect to NPC interactions, many of which are required to advance the game. With so many generic negative responses to various attempts, the modern player is quickly trained to stop trying -- it takes a concerted old-school style brute force approach to discover certain possibilities(Spoiler - click to show). I'm thinking specifically here of the gorilla, which must be threatened for no good reason to obtain the cigar, and the fact that escaping the first encounter with the main villain can only happen at a certain point. This results in guess-the-verb situations that are always offputting in such an otherwise polished work, and the very constrained implementation of interactions leaves little to do by way of experimentation when one doesn't have a clear idea of what to do next. (Although there is a hint system, it's very vague and, as MathBrush notes, occasionally non-functional.)

The thing that impressed me the most about this game was the soundtrack. Guest assembled an interesting ambient score from various bits of free-to-use music and sound effects, and the game cycles through them over time. (It's actually one giant 17 1/2 minute track; the length keeps the repetition below the threshold of obvious notice.) The soundtrack plays extremely smoothly, and unlike many attempts at background music which I've encountered, this one does not begin to grate in short order. In fact, rather than searching for a way to turn it off, I found myself turning it back on whenever it was automatically stopped by an >UNDO command.

This work gets high marks as a concept, but the execution falls a little short of what it needs in order to be truly recommendable to the general public or the novice. For those who like "weird" humor, there is plenty to like about it as is, and for those who don't, well... Guest provides occasional laughworthy quips that don't rely on weirdness at all. (Example: "For the record: Alligator breath smells like people who wondered what alligator breath smells like.") I'm putting it in the "good, not great" category, which means I think it's worth taking the time to play and study, and I would gladly revisit an updated version.

Having just written a long review taking a game to task for its toothless satire, I come now to Renegade Brainwave, which finally has the gumption to set its lance at a real sacred cow: terrible B-movies of the 1950s, especially those made by Ed Wood. This is working in “loving parody” mode, though – from the overwrought narration to the main character’s penchant for cross-dressing, the game’s animated by a clear affection for its source material, warts and all, and wants nothing more than to share its enthusiasm with the player. The introductory narration, for example, comes from an undead circus-ringmaster whose words practically beg you to imagine the hammed-up delivery:

“Beware! Take care! For you are about take part in an interactive story that will reveal the terrifying truth behind the ill-fated Soviet space program! Revelations of incredible horrors that will terrify you with their brutal reality!”

“For this is the story of a mysterious force — a force that has crossed the billion-mile vastness of infinite space! Boneless, fleshless, almost invisible and yet imbued with incredible power — I speak to you of cosmic radiation!”

(Almost invisible?)

This histrionic voice is maintained in the game proper, where you step into the white vinyl go-go boots of a beat cop who’s been charged with investigating a mysterious meteor that’s cratered into the burial ground for local carnies, alongside your partner, an off-brand Ronald McDonald (I am not trying to be funny, this is just a straightforward description of the setup). The swamp-choked graveyard is home to all sorts of hazards and haunts, all described with a purplishness of prose that would put the ripest eggplant to shame, but there’s room for snappy jokes, too:

"Pallid-faced with a shock of orange hair and a red nose, Donald is one of the more bizarre-looking officers in your precinct, topped only by Officer McGillicuddy who is a chimpanzee, and Officer McKenzie, a spoon."

The map is laid out in a compact three-by-three grid, and it doesn’t take much poking around to learn what’s actually going on: that meteor was actually a crashing Russian spaceship, and the cosmonaut, a Soviet cur – I mean she is literally a dog – has been given psychic powers by space radiation and now is working on a machine to create an army of the dead (again, this is just the plot, I’m not adding any additional wackiness or anything). Foiling her plans requires testing your wits against the living and unliving denizens of the swamp, from a giant alligator to a fetid bubble of swamp gas, and marshaling the talents of your often-uncooperating partner to boot.

The game’s wordy narrative voice does mean that I struggled at first to get into the rhythm of the puzzles; nine locations isn’t very much in the grand scheme of things, but some of them boast entrances to buildings, and all have long, dense descriptions that take some repeated reading to fully parse. Fortunately, they don’t actually have all that many implemented nouns, and the game’s pretty good about highlighting the one or two actually-interactive objects per area. While some of the challenges can feel a bit obscure, the fact that at any given time there’s only one or two puzzles you can make progress on paradoxically helped me focus my efforts, since it meant I could put all my brain-power to the question of what good the angora sweater I just recovered could possibly do me (beyond going nicely with my Mary Quant dress, of course). There were a few challenges that stymied me for a bit – including one that appears to have been added in an update to the game, and therefore isn’t addressed by the hint system or provided walkthrough – but close observation and a bit of trial and error were generally enough to come up with a reasonable solution.

Some of those solutions might be more challenging for beginning and intermediate parser players, though, as they center on ordering around your partner, Donald – I get the sense that the NPC, ACTION syntax isn’t especially commonly used, these days. Once I got the idea to try to leverage his skills, though, I found these puzzles were generally intuitive, though I think as a sidekick Donald unfortunately does leave something to be desired. For one thing, every turn you direct a bit of banter at him, and even though there’s a long list of random lines here, over the course of the game the well definitely ran dry, and the duplicative dialogue contributed to the feeling that location descriptions were exhaustingly long. For another, Donald often works at cross purposes to you, stealing your things, playing practical jokes on you, and generally being a nudge. It’s easy to recover from most of his hijinks, and I suppose the incompetent sidekick is a B-movie staple, but I still found it pretty irritating to be locked into a coffin over and over.

This is a somewhat churlish objection to a single element of an incredibly good-natured package. Renegade Brainwave wants you to have a good time, and if counterproductive slapstick is part of that package alongside over-the-top writing and cartoon-logic puzzles, well, I won’t presume to mess with the recipe. If you don’t enjoy the vibe of the source material, or don’t get on with fairly challenging puzzles, Renegade Brainwave probably won’t change you’re mind, but if you’re an MST3K fan who wants to go back to where it all started, this game’s got your frequency.