The Peccary Myth

You are on the trail of Greggery Peccary, the star programmer of Trendly's Cyber Trends, who designed addictive games such as Cliikus... and now he's gone. Cyber Trends is worried, there is unrest, and it's up to you to search Guillermo City to find Greggery Peccary.

This game was submitted as part of Shufflecomp - based on Frank Zappa's The Myth of Greggery Peccary, which refers, in part, to the people who create trends... if I read the lyrics correctly. This explains the almost constant references to, well, trends and memes. You'll spot it when you see it, really.

The language is deliberately mangled - yes, it's difficult to read - which, if I read it correctly, it makes a nod to badly translated Japanese-to-English. The game touches on some ideas of using addictive media to anesthesise a population (a la Fahrenheit 451) and government-sponsored mind control, though they were never explored in detail.

One interesting feature is an adaptive map (i.e. map changes with your progress in the story). The way The Peccary Myth treats navigation is, as another reviewer has pointed out, similar to a point and click game. The story's geography is clearly set out, a helpful tool for the player, though this was not crucial to the game.

The Peccary Myth is a game which laughs at itself and is chock full of wit, but it's let down by a lack of focus on any one theme.