Download


Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebees.zip
Contains Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebees/applebees/index.html
Play this game in your Web browser. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to downloadable files
All updates to this page

Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's

by Geoffrey Golden

Humor
2022

Web Site

(based on 29 ratings)
10 reviews

About the Story

You are a Psychic Brand Ambassador for Schtupmeister Beer. Listen to the thoughts of customers at the local Applebee's and convince them to try your syrupy ale. But will being in these peoples' heads convince you to get involved in their lives?


Game Details

Language: English (en)
First Publication Date: October 1, 2022
Current Version: Unknown
License: Freeware
Development System: Ink
IFID: Unknown
TUID: 8s21tfx7mdodfwit

Awards

16th Place - 28th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2022)

Winner, Outstanding Short Game of 2022 - Player's Choice; Winner, Outstanding Ink Game of 2022 - Author’s Choice - The 2022 IFDB Awards

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)

Member Reviews

5 star:
(3)
4 star:
(8)
3 star:
(17)
2 star:
(1)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 10
Write a review


Most Helpful Member Reviews


5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Use mind control for corporate profit--sparingly, October 29, 2022
by MathBrush
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

As of writing, this is tied with Esther for the most-reviewed game of IFComp 2022.

It's a fun short Ink game where you have the ability once per night per person to inject corporate slogans into people's brains.

The fun of the game is that you can use your powers to mind read 4 different 'tracks' all night (i.e. following each of the four main NPCs), jumping tracks at will, as well as watching the TV as a 5th track.

Your actions have a variety of drastic side-effects, and strategizing is fun, so I replayed several times. I do think it could have been fun to be a little longer, or have one more person, but overall I found it very impressive.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A dubiously-ethical ESP marketing simulator, December 5, 2022
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2022

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).

Would it be elitist to confess that I can’t say for sure whether I’ve ever eaten at an Applebee’s? I’ve mostly lived in fairly big cities, and even when I travel for work, because I don’t drive I never wind up at the sorts of suburban strip-malls that tend to host the chain restaurant. For purposes of this review, though, I’m trying to conjure up some associations – I’ve got a sense of the look and overall vibes from Friday Night Lights, since one of the characters was a waitress there for a couple of seasons, and for the actual food I’m imagining Chili’s and subtracting the (admittedly already rather slight) southwestern angle (Chili’s is also a strip-mall kind of place, I think, but there was one sort of accessible when I was in high school so at least I’ve been there a couple times).

Anyway based on that almost-completely-groundless supposition, what I’m coming up with is a restaurant that isn’t any better than it ought to be, but isn’t much worse, either – like, a mediocre place that earns its meh rating not through consistent middle-of-the-road performance, but by frustrating whatever expectations you bring to it: if you think it’s going to be awful, you might be surprised that one or two of the things you get are relatively solid, but if you go in expecting to be wowed, you’re likely in for disappointment.

If that’s right, the restaurant has something in common with the characters of Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s, a short optimization game in Ink that tasks you – an employee of the Schtupmeister brewery, purveyors of a syrupy ale that sounds simply revolting – with reading the minds of four patrons of a franchise somewhere in Middle America and giving them a mental nudge, when the moment’s right, suggesting they try one of your patron’s products using your psychic powers (you can only make one such suggestion per person, due to incredibly-fuzzily-invoked legal issues). In practice, what this means is that you eavesdrop on each, listening to the thoughts of the waitress, the already-in-his-cups older man, the crypto bro, the snot-nosed tween (yes, you can get a 12-year-old hooked on Schtupmeister. Apparently Applebee’s isn’t big on carding?), learning a little about their hopes, dreams, and fears, waiting for a moment when they’re happily distracted enough for your brain mojo to give them a little push.

What you find out, listening in, is that they’re all a little scuzzy – but not too scuzzy. The older guy is celebrating a not-especially-savory escapade that’s left him flush with cash, but he didn’t do anything so awful, and hey, he kinda needed a win. The kid’s consumed with figuring out which of two characters would win in a fight, but he’s also contemplating a crime of his own. The waitress isn’t above a spot of pickpocketing, but adheres to a consistent set of carnie values. The crypto bro – well, he’s a crypto bro, but at least he has a sick mom. And as for you, well, read the previous paragraph about what your job is again.

A game where you only get four opportunities to act could get a little stale, but the author’s done a good job of fitting the design to the constraint. For one thing, it’s short – each playthrough takes maybe five minutes or so, meaning there’s not a lot of downtime where you’re just waiting to click next even if you’ve already taken all your shots. Second, time marches ahead regardless of who you’re listening to – so if you flit from person to person, you could well miss out on a key opportunity, or key information, from someone else. So it works like an optimization game, as you’ll probably do a series of playthroughs focusing on one or maybe two characters each until you have a sense of what their deal is, and when they might be vulnerable. And then there are also a few moments when you’ve got the opportunity to do something other than push a crappy beer on vulnerable people, before reaching the denouement which gives you a last chance to interact with each of the characters and then offers a quickie job evaluation from your boss.

It’s a solid structure that supports four or five playthroughs to get the outcome that feels right to you –one canny thing about the setup is that since complete success means getting a large number of people potentially hooked on a terrible product, the compulsion to play past the point of enjoyment to wring out a “best ending” is largely absent. And honestly, I wanted to put in those replays to see all the jokes I’d missed. I’d characterize Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s more as amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, but it had me smiling a bunch all the same. Like, here’s what happens if you try to strike up a conversation with the drunk guy by pretending you know him from somewhere:

”Excuse me, sir,” you stop to ask the customer. “Sorry to bug you, but this is driving me crazy. Did we go to magician school together?”

”No, I never went to magician school… but it’s not the first time someone’s … asked me that. There must be an up-and-coming… magician who looks just like me,” the customer replies, drunk and befuddled.

Sometimes the author is reaching a little too hard to find humor – there’s a Clubhouse joke that feels instantly dated – but there are way more hits than misses here, and it’s nice that the laughs don’t come too much at the expense of the sad-sacks stuck in a chain restaurant on what feels like it must be a Tuesday night. Between the good writing, clever design, and faintly-detectable humanist vibe, after all maybe this one’s more Cheesecake Factory than Applebee’s.


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Fun idea worthy of multiple playthroughs, October 13, 2022
by RadioactiveCrow (Irving, TX)
Related reviews: About 15 minutes, IF Comp 2022

In this choice-based game you play as a psychic marketing agent for a lousy beer company. Your job on this night is to order the latest frankenfood off the Extreme Menu!, sit at your booth and use your psychic powers to convince the other patrons to order your company's beer. The game offers you some hints right of the bat if you want them, not cheats, more like strategies, and then you are off. Jump around into the different minds at the restaurant and try to find the right moment to get them to try your beer.

The game offers multiple endings indicating various degrees of success. It follows the pattern of other choice-based puzzle games I've played before, where your ultimate goal is to find the correct path through the story to get the best ending and it requires multiple playthroughs to figure it out.

The writing is decent with some funny moments and colorful, if not deep, characters. There are plenty of things that don't make sense like (Spoiler - click to show)the idea that you can convince a 12-year-old to order beer (the Jr. variety!) or that you can convince a waitress on duty to drink one and then somehow she ends up with a case of it in her car when the night ends (does Applebee's sell beer-to-go now?), but no matter, this game is supposed to be wacky, not realistic.

Overall fun and easy to playthrough 3-4 times quickly to try to figure out the correct path. A good way to spend 15 minutes, but not much more.


See All 10 Member Reviews

If you enjoyed Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's...

Related Games

People who like Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's also gave high ratings to these games:

Recursion., by Adrian Belmes
Average member rating: (4 ratings)
A digital-born hypertext produced in Twine for the San Diego State University 2018 Electronic Literature Competition. The work is a non-linear exploration of the extremes to which individuals will go in pursuit of happiness, revolving...

The Mulldoon Legacy, by Jon Ingold
Average member rating: (39 ratings)
"In the event of my disappearance, my legacy shall not be distributed until every room in my museum has been searched in case I can be located." --Last Will and Testament, E. Mulldoon.

Black Marker, by Michael Kielstra
Average member rating: (20 ratings)
Hidden in the shadows, the Agency works for the safety of the citizens. If your goals or beliefs do not appear to align with those of the Agency, you are liable to find yourself in trouble. There are those who believe that it is a menace...

Suggest a game

Polls

The following polls include votes for Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's:

Outstanding Humor Game of 2022 - Player's Choice by MathBrush
This poll is part of the 2022 IFDB Awards. The rules for the competition can be found here, and a list of all categories can be found here. This award is for the best humor game of 2022. Voting is open to all IFDB members. Eligible games...

Outstanding Short Game of 2022 - Player's Choice by MathBrush
This poll is part of the 2022 IFDB Awards. The rules for the competition can be found here, and a list of all categories can be found here. This award is for the best short game of 2022, where the definition of 'short' is left up to the...

Best IF Titles by Fredrik
No doubt you have played some great games with great titles, or been disappointed to find games with great titles that did not hold up to expectations. What are the best titles of IF? They can be funny, elegant, evocative, or whatever...

See all polls with votes for this game




This is version 4 of this page, edited by nf on 1 February 2023 at 11:48pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item