Hobbiton Recall

Mashing up J.R.R. Tolkien with Philip K. Dick isn’t an idea that feels obvious, even in retrospect. Sure, they both gained their greatest popularity in the 60s and each had at least one prominent middle initial, other than that? Tolkien’s reputation rests on a few long books, Dick’s on a flurry of short ones; Dick was the bard of a quintessentially American brand of paranoia, Tolkien of a quintessentially English brand of heroism. One searches in vain in Tolkien for Dick’s signature themes of identity, surveillance, and the contingent nature of reality, while Dick deals with Tolkienian motifs like the quest, the redemption of the powerful by the weak, and the tragedy of corruption infrequently and ironically.

Hobbiton Recall’s synthesis of these two authors at first, then, seems to work only at the level of plot – per the blurb, the game runs through the narrative of We Can Remember it for you Wholesale/Total Recall, except with the Martian espionage angle swapped for adventure in Middle-Earth – rather than any substantive connection. But sadly it swiftly becomes clear that it’s working in one tradition common to both of them: being fucking terrible at writing women. Dick’s women are either ball-cutting shrews or naïve sexpots, while Tolkien’s of course are mostly just nonexistent, but Hobbiton Recall opts for its own particular blend of misogyny by having the protagonist constantly condescend to and belittle his wife, when he isn’t behaving like a helpless baby reliant on her for his basic needs. It’s a blatantly obvious element of the game’s writing, and I suppose it’s possible that it’s part of a game-long arc that eventually sees the main character eat some crow. But if so, the game plays it very straight for at least its first hour, meaning that when I hit a progress-breaking bug, I couldn’t be bothered to try to find a workaround.

I suppose I should say that that’s a shame. It is nice to see a GrueScript game in the Comp, and part of me admires the fact that the game appears to be a bit of a shaggy dog story, since in that first hour I solved a bunch of my dumb apartment puzzles to get out of the house, and then wound up stuck in some unrelated busywork having to do with a urine sample, before finally getting a chance to try out the memory-implanting technology – but instead of landing me in Hobbiton, it just sent me to the hospital where I ran into the fatal bug (I believe that bug has been fixed since I wrote this review). Again, I can’t say for sure whether keeping the player so far away from the actual premise of the game for so long is an accidental design weakness or an intentional provocation, but I admit I was a bit disappointed when I checked the source code and saw that there does appear to be a substantial Middle Earth segment eventually. There are one or two funny jokes (when perusing the memory packages, you respond negatively to the option of remembering a life as an assembly-line worker, because you already are one, only for the sales rep to ask “Yes, but have you ever been an assembly line worker in Kettering?”) and one or two reasonably-satisfying puzzles, like the one where you chase away some hooligans with a stick.

But my god, the whole thing is just so sour. Here’s the introduction of the protagonist’s wife:

"Her tongue was hanging out of the corner of her mouth, and a warm patch of drool was forming on her chin. Dave smiled; she looked just like she did when they had met in a crowded bar all those years ago."

What the fuck, game. Right after that, you wake her up in the middle of the night – by pinching her nose closed while she’s sleeping! – to send her to the kitchen to get you a warm glass of milk and a cookie, at which point you’re treated to this I-see-your-what-the-fuck-game-and-raise-you-one-more bit of prose:

"Just the one biscuit, mind, too much sugar at this time of night was liable to turn Dave a bit frisky—and she didn’t want that!

"Dave lay back on his pillow, his hands fumbling down the front of his pyjama pants."

Some other bits from the game’s opening section:

"Mavis has been decorating the landing for the last 3 weeks. You should get on at her to speed things up!"

"It’s the first room guests see when they enter the house, so you are very strict with Mavis about always keeping it nicely hoovered."

"'Would you mind not yawning?' you ask politely. 'Not only is it unbecoming of a lady to yawn at the breakfast table, but I also find it extremely sexually unappealing. And what’s more, you’re putting me off my Coco Pops.'"

"This is where Mavis comes to have a little cry when she’s having one of her ‘episodes’."

It’s not just Mavis – there’s a “joke” later where the death of another worker’s wife is played entirely for laughs, and at the factory there’s a woman who’s hunchbacked and deformed and hideous, and the “joke” here is that nobody talks to her. I suppose it’s not just women who have a bad time of it, as the ill-natured puzzles also include things like playing a screeching tune on the bagpipes to wake up a sleeping cat for no earthly reason. But yeah, it’s definitely mostly about women. At least there is one attractive female character – a sexy nurse who’s having an affair with a married doctor (this is where I hit the bug; I was clearly supposed to use my knowledge of the affair to blackmail the doctor into letting me leave the hospital, but the option never appeared).

If I were trying to be balanced, at this point I’d try to scrape together a few more positive points about the game to offset additional critiques I haven’t yet gotten to (there are more bugs, like a teleporting pen and a urine sample whose description doesn’t update even after you accidentally spill it; several puzzles, like replacing the aforementioned urine with pond water, are underclued or nonsensical, and the “walkthrough” that comes with the game just provides hints and stops about a third of the way in; and the genAI pixel art throughout added one more source of omnipresent irritation to the proceedings). But I can’t find it in me to muster up the energy. I’ll say one thing for Hobbiton Recall – at least next time I read some Tolkien or Dick and roll my eyes at their bad treatment of women, I can think to myself “well, could be worse.”