Hobbiton Recall

The title of this review is a quote from the author-supplied blurb for Hobbiton Recall. It is, unfortunately, accurate.

It's not clear why the author chose to involve either The Hobbit or Total Recall in this game. Although elements from those two sources appear within, the motivation for choosing that pair specifically is in no way apparent. Neither particularly relates to the main plot of the game, which seems to revolve around toothpaste, nor do the elements selected from each interact in a meaningful or synergistic way. It seems like the pair of ostensible inspirations could just have easily been E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Minority Report, or Aquaman and Top Gun -- really any two intellectual properties with good name recognition and no obvious resonance, since the main purpose seems to be to provoke a curiosity about what the author has come up with to justify the juxtaposition.

Regrettably, most of what the author has come up with is AI-generated pixel art and jokes rooted in misogyny.

The original release included a game-breaking bug that prevented going beyond the first third or so of the game. If one finds oneself stuck (Spoiler - click to show)at a hospital with a bus ticket, that bug is the reason. This may have been corrected in a September 8 update. Since Gruescript is interpreted, its source is inspectable and can be modified, so it was possible to fix this bug and proceed before any official correction.

Since in general this game does function, I'd like to say something positive. However, I'm having trouble coming up with anything beyond the fact that the author seems to have put a large amount of work into it.

On the whole, this feels primarily like the product of the author's efforts to learn Gruescript. Clearly, quite a bit was learned. There's a noticeable progression of complexity in the coding as one moves steadily toward the end.

There are still lessons to learn regarding interaction design, e.g. being consistent in the patterns of action expected from players. I noticed, for example, that in some cases special actions are attached to the indirect object, in others the direct object. Also, in some cases the necessary item must be "held," i.e. selected, instead of just in inventory. Also, the implementation of the hedge maze was novel in my experience, but definitely unappreciated: (Spoiler - click to show)Per the code, just moving randomly is the key. There is no actual geography, one just gets shunted to the goal location about 10% of the time when moving in the single maze room.

In a couple of places it appears that the game can reach a "dead end" state in which it can no longer be finished, though I'm guessing that this is unintentional. If you are trying to reach the end of this lengthy game, I strongly suggest making use of the save game function on a regular basis.

I guess the fact that I tried my first Gruescript game and even learned a little bit about Gruescript code is also to this game's credit. Someone learning that platform might want to review the source code of this game for some example solutions to typical problems. As entertainment, however, I can't recommend it.

Mashing up J.R.R. Tolkien with Philip K. Dick isn’t an idea that feels obvious, even in retrospect. Sure, they both gained their greatest popularity in the 60s and each had at least one prominent middle initial, other than that? Tolkien’s reputation rests on a few long books, Dick’s on a flurry of short ones; Dick was the bard of a quintessentially American brand of paranoia, Tolkien of a quintessentially English brand of heroism. One searches in vain in Tolkien for Dick’s signature themes of identity, surveillance, and the contingent nature of reality, while Dick deals with Tolkienian motifs like the quest, the redemption of the powerful by the weak, and the tragedy of corruption infrequently and ironically.

Hobbiton Recall’s synthesis of these two authors at first, then, seems to work only at the level of plot – per the blurb, the game runs through the narrative of We Can Remember it for you Wholesale/Total Recall, except with the Martian espionage angle swapped for adventure in Middle-Earth – rather than any substantive connection. But sadly it swiftly becomes clear that it’s working in one tradition common to both of them: being fucking terrible at writing women. Dick’s women are either ball-cutting shrews or naïve sexpots, while Tolkien’s of course are mostly just nonexistent, but Hobbiton Recall opts for its own particular blend of misogyny by having the protagonist constantly condescend to and belittle his wife, when he isn’t behaving like a helpless baby reliant on her for his basic needs. It’s a blatantly obvious element of the game’s writing, and I suppose it’s possible that it’s part of a game-long arc that eventually sees the main character eat some crow. But if so, the game plays it very straight for at least its first hour, meaning that when I hit a progress-breaking bug, I couldn’t be bothered to try to find a workaround.

I suppose I should say that that’s a shame. It is nice to see a GrueScript game in the Comp, and part of me admires the fact that the game appears to be a bit of a shaggy dog story, since in that first hour I solved a bunch of my dumb apartment puzzles to get out of the house, and then wound up stuck in some unrelated busywork having to do with a urine sample, before finally getting a chance to try out the memory-implanting technology – but instead of landing me in Hobbiton, it just sent me to the hospital where I ran into the fatal bug (I believe that bug has been fixed since I wrote this review). Again, I can’t say for sure whether keeping the player so far away from the actual premise of the game for so long is an accidental design weakness or an intentional provocation, but I admit I was a bit disappointed when I checked the source code and saw that there does appear to be a substantial Middle Earth segment eventually. There are one or two funny jokes (when perusing the memory packages, you respond negatively to the option of remembering a life as an assembly-line worker, because you already are one, only for the sales rep to ask “Yes, but have you ever been an assembly line worker in Kettering?”) and one or two reasonably-satisfying puzzles, like the one where you chase away some hooligans with a stick.

But my god, the whole thing is just so sour. Here’s the introduction of the protagonist’s wife:

"Her tongue was hanging out of the corner of her mouth, and a warm patch of drool was forming on her chin. Dave smiled; she looked just like she did when they had met in a crowded bar all those years ago."

What the fuck, game. Right after that, you wake her up in the middle of the night – by pinching her nose closed while she’s sleeping! – to send her to the kitchen to get you a warm glass of milk and a cookie, at which point you’re treated to this I-see-your-what-the-fuck-game-and-raise-you-one-more bit of prose:

"Just the one biscuit, mind, too much sugar at this time of night was liable to turn Dave a bit frisky—and she didn’t want that!

"Dave lay back on his pillow, his hands fumbling down the front of his pyjama pants."

Some other bits from the game’s opening section:

"Mavis has been decorating the landing for the last 3 weeks. You should get on at her to speed things up!"

"It’s the first room guests see when they enter the house, so you are very strict with Mavis about always keeping it nicely hoovered."

"'Would you mind not yawning?' you ask politely. 'Not only is it unbecoming of a lady to yawn at the breakfast table, but I also find it extremely sexually unappealing. And what’s more, you’re putting me off my Coco Pops.'"

"This is where Mavis comes to have a little cry when she’s having one of her ‘episodes’."

It’s not just Mavis – there’s a “joke” later where the death of another worker’s wife is played entirely for laughs, and at the factory there’s a woman who’s hunchbacked and deformed and hideous, and the “joke” here is that nobody talks to her. I suppose it’s not just women who have a bad time of it, as the ill-natured puzzles also include things like playing a screeching tune on the bagpipes to wake up a sleeping cat for no earthly reason. But yeah, it’s definitely mostly about women. At least there is one attractive female character – a sexy nurse who’s having an affair with a married doctor (this is where I hit the bug; I was clearly supposed to use my knowledge of the affair to blackmail the doctor into letting me leave the hospital, but the option never appeared).

If I were trying to be balanced, at this point I’d try to scrape together a few more positive points about the game to offset additional critiques I haven’t yet gotten to (there are more bugs, like a teleporting pen and a urine sample whose description doesn’t update even after you accidentally spill it; several puzzles, like replacing the aforementioned urine with pond water, are underclued or nonsensical, and the “walkthrough” that comes with the game just provides hints and stops about a third of the way in; and the genAI pixel art throughout added one more source of omnipresent irritation to the proceedings). But I can’t find it in me to muster up the energy. I’ll say one thing for Hobbiton Recall – at least next time I read some Tolkien or Dick and roll my eyes at their bad treatment of women, I can think to myself “well, could be worse.”

This is a Gruescript game mixing Total Recall with The Hobbit. It uses ai-generated pixel art.

It's quite long. It's listed as 1.5 hours, but I spent about that long on just the prelude. Altogether I think I spent 3 or 4 hours, with the last hour entirely spent peeking at the code to speed me along.

You play as a gross jerk of a human who hates and is cruel to his wife, doesn't care about sabotaging her medical care and avoids talking to women he deems ugly. This isn't plot relevant and so I guess it's supposed to be either funny or realistic, but I neither laughed nor saw a reflection of truth in it.

The first part of the game has you going to work at the toothpaste factory and scrounging up some money to go to Rekall, a location that allows you to get memories you want implanted. Like the original story of Total Recall, doing so prompts some memories that you have that are true, but buried.

The rest of the game is a parody of The Hobbit where gold has been replaced by toothpaste, the misty mountains are now a ski resort, the dwarves have disappeared, and the main badguy is toothpaste entrepreneur Tom Fallows.

Most non-Robin Johnson gruescript games I've played have been pretty buggy or poorly implemented (with a couple notable great exceptions, and now that I'm searching I'm surprised to see only 10 have only ever been released. And Dialog only has 22; wow)

There are parts of this game that I like and parts I dislike. I'm going to talk about both, and try to frame the dislikes (like the being a jerk to your wife part) as my reaction to something and not as an innate quality of the thing itself.

I like some of the imaginative puzzles. There's a lot of tricks going on with things like moving turnips to strategic locations, figuring out how to use the lemonade, timing, and the troll bag puzzle.

I didn't like getting stuck because I forget to look and grab an item a hundred turns ago. Fortunately I saved a lot! Also the random timers felt off a bit. The maze randomness I saw in the code wasn't something that I experienced joy from, nor waiting for the trolls to go to bed or the cat to wander into the kitchen.

Story-wise, I experienced the most happiness at the innate difficulty in establishing what's reality and what's the effect of Rekall, something I also enjoyed in total recall.

I didn't like the Tolkien elements as much, it felt kind of like it just took the summary story of the hobbit and tried to make an encounter matching each one without really caring about parodying the deeper themes. To be fair, that's a totally fine way to parody things; I parodided Chandler Groover's games in Grooverland with entirely surface-level references, so I can't complain. Maybe what I really would have liked is a more unified parody theme. Sometimes things have been updated to modern times, while other times the scenes play out almost exactly like the original. It could have been fun to have something tying it all together more.

The AI art was hit or miss. A couple of times I thought, "Okay, this looks cool," but then I realized, for instance, that our bedroom that looks like a hobbit house with first-floor window overlooking a forest is actually not the hobbit part of the game but our 2nd floor bedroom in the middle of a city. Similarly, styles change from room to room and so do seasons and so on. Just like the parody, without a consistent theme, it's not much more helpful to the game than just imagining each scene ourselves.

If I were the author, I'd be proud of assembling a very long gruescript game, perhaps the longest I've played (Detectiveland might be longer). All told it has few errors, a rarity for such a long game, and there were multiple places I found enjoyable.