Hobbiton Recall

This is a Gruescript game mixing Total Recall with The Hobbit. It uses ai-generated pixel art.

It's quite long. It's listed as 1.5 hours, but I spent about that long on just the prelude. Altogether I think I spent 3 or 4 hours, with the last hour entirely spent peeking at the code to speed me along.

You play as a gross jerk of a human who hates and is cruel to his wife, doesn't care about sabotaging her medical care and avoids talking to women he deems ugly. This isn't plot relevant and so I guess it's supposed to be either funny or realistic, but I neither laughed nor saw a reflection of truth in it.

The first part of the game has you going to work at the toothpaste factory and scrounging up some money to go to Rekall, a location that allows you to get memories you want implanted. Like the original story of Total Recall, doing so prompts some memories that you have that are true, but buried.

The rest of the game is a parody of The Hobbit where gold has been replaced by toothpaste, the misty mountains are now a ski resort, the dwarves have disappeared, and the main badguy is toothpaste entrepreneur Tom Fallows.

Most non-Robin Johnson gruescript games I've played have been pretty buggy or poorly implemented (with a couple notable great exceptions, and now that I'm searching I'm surprised to see only 10 have only ever been released. And Dialog only has 22; wow)

There are parts of this game that I like and parts I dislike. I'm going to talk about both, and try to frame the dislikes (like the being a jerk to your wife part) as my reaction to something and not as an innate quality of the thing itself.

I like some of the imaginative puzzles. There's a lot of tricks going on with things like moving turnips to strategic locations, figuring out how to use the lemonade, timing, and the troll bag puzzle.

I didn't like getting stuck because I forget to look and grab an item a hundred turns ago. Fortunately I saved a lot! Also the random timers felt off a bit. The maze randomness I saw in the code wasn't something that I experienced joy from, nor waiting for the trolls to go to bed or the cat to wander into the kitchen.

Story-wise, I experienced the most happiness at the innate difficulty in establishing what's reality and what's the effect of Rekall, something I also enjoyed in total recall.

I didn't like the Tolkien elements as much, it felt kind of like it just took the summary story of the hobbit and tried to make an encounter matching each one without really caring about parodying the deeper themes. To be fair, that's a totally fine way to parody things; I parodided Chandler Groover's games in Grooverland with entirely surface-level references, so I can't complain. Maybe what I really would have liked is a more unified parody theme. Sometimes things have been updated to modern times, while other times the scenes play out almost exactly like the original. It could have been fun to have something tying it all together more.

The AI art was hit or miss. A couple of times I thought, "Okay, this looks cool," but then I realized, for instance, that our bedroom that looks like a hobbit house with first-floor window overlooking a forest is actually not the hobbit part of the game but our 2nd floor bedroom in the middle of a city. Similarly, styles change from room to room and so do seasons and so on. Just like the parody, without a consistent theme, it's not much more helpful to the game than just imagining each scene ourselves.

If I were the author, I'd be proud of assembling a very long gruescript game, perhaps the longest I've played (Detectiveland might be longer). All told it has few errors, a rarity for such a long game, and there were multiple places I found enjoyable.