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Review
When the Republican Party inevitably moves on from having Trump as its standard-bearer (soon may the day come), there’s a chance they’ll land on Hubert Janus next. Sure, he’s fictional, and probably British, to boot, but he’s clearly devoted to inverting Marx: for in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, Europe is haunting a spectre.
No, wait, I mean: in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, history repeats itself, first as farce, second as tragedy. ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG is of course the sequel to last year’s DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, which was precision-engineered to win the Golden Banana of discord (seriously. There was math). It offered two separate paths to potential players, determined randomly and irrevocably upon startup; while I believe both elaborated upon the scenario teased in its title one, apparently, was surprisingly robust and engaging, designed to elicit a middling score, while the second was an intentionally-awful congeries of timed text, GeoCities-era flashing text and overbusy design, completely linear gameplay, and a conga line of cameos from Darth Vader to Adolf Hitler. I got the second version, and finding its goofily over-the-top effort to be the worst game in the Comp sublimely ridiculous, gave it the 1/10 it was angling for.
To say DICK MCBUTTS is a tough act to follow is an understatement (and possibly a butt joke in itself). But ROD MCSCHLONG makes a manful go at providing more of the same, but different. In particular, whereas the comedy in the former came from the dizzying variety of ways that the titular act was perpetrated, here DONG-PUNCHING is a fail state; the groin of our hero is ever-threatened, but the player has the agency to guide ROD through the gauntlet and escape the ever-thrusting fists of, in turn, a swole leprechaun, a passel of mutated Sciuridae, alien overlords with more limbs than a Hindu god, and more besides. You’re only offered at most two options at any time, and the Twine game allows you to freely undo, so a bad end just means enduring a gif depicting shocking stick-figure violence and then a replay, but for a joke game, ROD MCSCHLONG does a good job of playing fair; more often than not, logical deduction, careful attention to detail, and a cautious regard for the importance of safeguarding your “baloney pony” will see you through. There’s an engaging sense of escalation throughout, too – it’s hopefully no spoiler to reveal that ultimately the very multiverse is put into the balance, meaning that you’re not just protecting one dong, but innumerable dongs across countless realities.
The tragedy is – well, there are two tragedies (see how elegantly Hubert rebuts Karl: everything repeats, not just history!) For one thing, while the game is structured around a dream of escape, the title exerts a remorseless pull: no matter how you try, no matter what you do, ROD MCSCHLONG will GET PUNCHED IN THE DOG, with each near-miss serving to raise the tension before the inevitable. Heck, you need to get out your classical-tragedy bingo card, because here we’ve got both character-is-destiny (the piece opens with ROD’s hubristic boast that no one will ever PUNCH him in the DONG) and trying-to-escape-fate-makes-it-happen (ROD’s efforts to evade PUNCHES are themselves what eventually put his DONG right in the line of fire).
The second tragedy is, well, of course it’s not quite as funny as DICK MCBUTTS. There are some great one-off gags, don’t get me wrong – I don’t exactly know what it means to say performing the eponymous assault would be “[l]ike going to the Cumberland Pencil Museum and trying to beat up the world’s largest coloured pencil,” but it makes me laugh anyway – but inevitably the second time around, the jokes don’t have quite the anarchic zing they once did. There’s an extended sequence involving an athletic supporter and cup that’s played a little too straight, and the easy way failure can be undoing means that ROD MCSCHLONG actually GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG quite a lot, with no lasting consequences. Despite a glee-inducing late-game cameo and quite a lot of craftsmanship, sadly the game ultimately can’t help but disappoint.
That’s OK though, since as stated it’s all in service of inverting Marx’s dialectics and endearing Hubert Janus to the GOP’s movers and shakers – at least until next Comp’s inevitable DONNIE MCTRUMP GETS THRASHED ON THE RUMP.
