TRASH

General Recommendation: This game is either your thing, or it’s not. If it is your thing, you’ll have an excellent time and will find it quite entertaining, and I recommend it. However, there are going to be some people for whom the humor in this story just doesn’t land.
Preview: Can you get a job and make enough money to convince your girlfriend to sleep with you at the end of the day?

=SPOILERS BELOW=

General notes:
The narrator of this story seems to have all the traits I disliked about the Geek, and none of the cleverness and resourcefulness that made him likeable. Even on the pathes where you succeed at making a quick buck, the narrator learns nothing, and nothing in his life really changes.
That said, the consistency of the narrator’s tone and attitude throughout the story ties together all the disparate branches. He is characterized quickly and effectively, and he keeps the story grounded despite the bizarre events that happen around him.
Everything here feels incredibly real. With most games there’s some sense of disconnect with the real world, but all the characters feel like real people you could actually meet and talk to, and somehow even all the bizarre events that happen are grounded by the narrator’s attitude towards them. Character voice and tone setting is done extremely well.
The mundanity and similarities between many of the endings (returning home to Tina) makes a nice bookend for all of the branches. You go out, you have a weird day, and then you go home. There’s a sense of rythym and cycle to this game that ties together all the branches. This game feels quite episodic, with all the plots feeling like things that could have happened to this character on different days.
For the most part, this story just leaves me wondering what the point was. Most of the endings are extremely mundane, with nothing changing in the protagonist’s life, and nothing meaningful happening during the story.
I’m still rating it an 8, because I try to rate games on quality rather than personal preference, and the only reason I didn’t enjoy this as much as some of EndMaster’s games is that I’m not in the target audience. Nevertheless, I can appreciate the craft and care that went into it, and for what it is, it’s very well done.

Specific notes:
-I get the sense this story is going to have a lot of gross-out humor, which isn’t really my thing. EndMaster has a talent for doing themes I dislike well, however, so I’ll reserve judgement.
-An… alligator? Was not expecting that.
-Employer killed in alligator attack, so the only logical thing to do was pick the cash register for change.
-There is plenty of gross-out humor, but so far it’s done in a way that’s more zany than genuinely disgusting. EndMaster doesn’t go into vivid descriptions, rather letting the reader use their imagination, which is more effective.
-Why is Tina dating this guy?
-The description of Jim’s room does a good job of characterizing him quickly and effectively.
-I find it amusing that you become a quasi local hero for getting into a scuffle with a guy with a brothel.
-I suspect th sequence at the pig farm will mean more to me when I get to Suzy’s Strange Saga.
-Also amusing that you accidentally provoke your cousin’s killing spree and just kind of leave.
-Crazy cat lady seems incredibly suspicious, but possibly rich.
-Lol you get cursed to be followed around by cats. The horror!
-I like that characters appear across multiple pathes, like Dan.
-The alien abduction is completely random, but fits oddly well with the tone of the work.

Grammar
Generally good.
Mastery of Language
Eh, not great. There’s a number of sentence structure issues. It fits well with the narrator’s haphazard nature, however.

Branching:
There’s an incredible amount of branching here. Pretty much every choice goes into its own unique narrative. The branches are generally not very deep, allowing for a reader to go quickly through a lot of different possible options.

Player Options/fair choice:
Generally good, outcomes are fair and predictable. There are some exceptions to this.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
This is the first of EndMaster’s games I hadn’t played before, so it was nice to read some fresh material. The first ending I got was the one where you get a job at the burger place and get fired for being in the room when an alligator busted out of the toilet.

CONCLUSION: Not my thing personally, but an objectively well-crafted story.