Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning Against the Parrot Creatures of Venus

Max Blaster is a game I am extremely divided on. On one hand, I love the written content and the story. Max and Doris are a great duo, with Max being the dumb action hero and Doris being the snarky sidekick who doesn't take his shit. Puzzles make use of their physical attributes and the different gadgets that each one has. You can switch between the two characters when they're together, but there are puzzles where you have to use a certain one.

The game's humor is really funny, with some highlights being a magazine full of bird puns and Max's repeated "I told you so"s to Doris after being saved from a snake. You also get a lot of footnotes that you can read for even more jokes. You can even type ">re-enact famous socio-political decisions" at one point and get a response. I like the interactive cutscenes that let you decide what you want to say, even if they're mostly at the beginning and end.

The thing I don't like about this game is the bugs and the unresponsive parser. So many times, I clearly knew what I wanted or had to do, but I had to figure out the right way to word it, and it felt like nothing I did would register. I'm not someone who usually gets tripped up by guess-the-verb, but this game was infuriating with it. Max's barrier tool -- you set it to a shape you want, then can summon that and use it physically -- was such a pain that I stuck to Doris until I was forced to learn how to use it.

It's so easy to get yourself hardlocked by bugs in this game. There is a mandatory portion in the middle involving opening modules on a computer, and if you use the same module more than once, you will get a parser error. There is no way to work around this and nothing you can do to progress. I also ran into numerous issues where text that was supposed to display didn't, leaving out critical parts of puzzles (the presence of a gap after you climb onto the stepladder) or story details (such as how Max gets across the gorge). I only saw these on replays.

Another problem I had was with the first split-up puzzle, Max needing to make a sandwich for robots. No matter how closely I followed the walkthrough, I was not able to get this to work. I had to restart the game and make sure I was Doris to get a different puzzle. When I entered an even more complicated puzzle with Max later in the game, I chickened out and decided to see what Doris's puzzle was, and it was thankfully more manageable. If you want the least frustrating way through the game, save often, and make sure you're Doris every time you get separated.

If you're willing to put up with an unpolished gameplay experience, give Max Blaster a try, because the story and jokes here is very much worth it.