GET MANIFE$TO

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Parser
Played: 7/8/26
Playtime: 2hrs, score 450/1000, blunzed, stuck and quit

Here is a smattering of things you will do in this game: mix a cocktail, murder with radioactive piss, unsuccessfully engage a punk rock lizard man. That sounds fun, doesn’t it?? It is! For a while. The work is an absurdist romp of trying to escape a lab after some apocalyptic accident. Its tone is probably its strongest asset. The whole thing is light, breezy and unserious, and never wavers in this (though some mileage may vary in the gruesome death scene? My mileage is just fine here.) The text is disciplined - area descriptions are concise, exposing their noteworthy details without obfuscation. The jokes are disciplined - short, poppy punchlines like, “He died the way he lived: full of radioactive piss.” All in all a very joyous text world to inhabit.

For a while.

The gameplay itself is a little less disciplined. There are many missing nouns and synonyms. The ASK ABOUT… command is provisioned, leading to expectations of NPC interaction which are RESOUNDINGLY unfruitful. And game play cues are deeply uneven. The work asks you to do many bonkers, unobvious things. This is very much of a piece with its bonkers tone, and usually quite fun. However, coaxing the player to TRY bonkers things is a but of a hurdle. Sometimes stray notes or object descriptions will cue things. Sometimes those cues are buried in hidden objects. Many times you just need to try stuff and see what happens. The effect of this is to leach away the light tone into slog territory. It took me an hour and a half to accomplish two (linked) multi-step puzzles. It took me another half hour to revisit exhausted territory, coming up empty on what I presumed to be the final puzzle. Absent HINTS or helpful NPCs it is a shotgun approach to gameplay. Quite often failure is rewarded with humorous rejections, softening the blow a bit, but on excessive repetition the charm leaks away. This is the kind of game CRYING for a walkthrough. Because its tasks are absurdist nonsense (in the best possible sense!), the prospect that players will not tumble to the unique brand of required lunacy looms large. A walkthrough (or robust hint system) is the best way to nudge players past that barrier, to keep the lively, fun vibe steaming along.

All in all, I really liked the light, fun vibe of this piece but felt its often opaque gameplay undermined it a bit. In turn stretching its playtime beyond what its humor could sustain. A churning, methodical plod through the locations is kind of the opposite of the breezy lark its text advertises. As a mental exercise, I do kind of wonder if I HAD finished the game, would its charms have prevailed? They just might. I don’t actually have a way to measure it, but it FEELS like the enjoyment gap is just less than an ‘I WON’ quanta. So more talented players, you are likely to have a better time than I did! (I find that to be generally true, across ALL walks of life.)

POST SCRIPT: There is an amusing meta answer to the 'What is the title referencing, actually?' question as the author provides their own manife$to of sorts of successful IF creation. I feel like maybe there could be one more part to it?