Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma

(The title of the review comes from the game itself. I couldn't resist.)

Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma is from 2010, but its core design sensibilities come from an earlier era. Author Juhana Leinonen maintains the overall feeling of a very old-school game but wraps it up in a fun and reasonably user-friendly package.

I think it's the feel of the NPCs that hearkens farthest back. For a game released in 2010, they are positively atavistic: serving largely as obstacles and treated by the PC as an inferior class of being instead of as fellow travelers in the game world. Scott Bruner notes in a contemporary SPAG review (linked on the game's page): "The characters aren’t one dimensional so much as they’re actually caricatures." This is true, but it is almost certainly intentional.

The game's comedy is almost purely of the bad-things-happen-to-people style. That's phrasing things a bit passively, since you are generally the one doing these bad things -- and when you're not doing them directly, you're certainly setting them into motion. At least one caricature (a "lounge lizard" type) is skillfully portrayed, such that the typical player is probably glad to see the straw man take a beating.

Although the design is "merciful" on the Zarfian scale, there is a smidgen of unintentional cruelty due to it being possible to get the game into a permanent loss state. (Spoiler - click to show)(At least, it seemed that way to me. It's possible to use the gum on the jukebox twice, and the second time the associated NP will be stuck trying to fix it forever. He also won't let you fix it. That means the music can never be changed, which is necessary in order to retrieve something from under the speaker.)

I was a bit disappointed that the actual showdowns on the stage were low on interactivity, since the setup seemed to promise that they would be the center of the action. Instead on a mechanical basis this game is a typical light puzzler in which overcoming obstacles off-stage allows the PC to do better when on-stage.

The presence of at least one game-breaking bug makes this one veer toward two-star territory, but since the average player probably won't run into it and the overall gameplay is pretty smooth, Raising remains safely in "good" territory via competent execution of a conventional design using an uncommon type of setting.