Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die

Looking back at the game now, it doesn't seem that revolutionary or interesting. It's almost a troll game, if anything. Games like Aisle have done its concept so much better.

Excellent deadpan humor. I was not expecting it to be possible to actually be able to win this game, so it was extra hilarious when I stumbled on the win condition.

Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die is based around one simple joke (see the title). There are two endings, each funny but neither hilarious. The game is famous within the interactive fiction community and gets referenced a lot, so play it if you want to understand the references (it's so short, you might as well).

This is certainly a minimalistic work, but the title actually undersells it. In a clever twist, picking up the phone booth and dying is only half of what Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die has to offer. Uncovering the other half is the real challenge here.

There are a lot of things I like about this game. It's efficient, in that it manages to pack a lot of punch into an extremely small package - with only two potential actions of consequence, only one of which can be executed in a single playthrough. The metatextual aspect, using the game's title to give crucial information even before play begins, is a neat trick as well.

But it has to be said that the game is woefully under-implemented. There are quite a few things that are described in the text but not implemented as objects: the town, the square, the smiley face. There are also quite a few default failure responses to actions that really ought to have been given more attention. I was disappointed, for example, that smelling or touching the phone booth yields only Inform's default message. With a world this small, it would have been relatively easy to really focus on the details, but unfortunately they haven't received so much care.

At the core of this game is a pretty good joke. But I feel that the best jokes are those which go all-out. Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die, unfortunately, does not.