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1 people found the following review helpful:
Hilarious sci-fi-horror comedy about a teen band, set in the 1990s, August 6, 2022(A version of this review first appeared in my blog during IFComp 2021.)
AardVarK Versus the Hype (AVH) is an extremely funny parser adventure about a bunch of teens whose rock band, AardVarK, suddenly becomes very important for the project of life's continuance when a corporate/alien entity known as Hype starts flogging its soft drinks ("sodas" for the handful of Americans out there) to innocent high-schoolers. The brew's side-effects include mindless shillism and bleeding from the orifices.
The game is set in 1997, a time when popular culture was still dominated by the recent explosion of alternative music into it but before the internet had made any excursion onto the same turf; the game is blissfully free of the internet. If I was going to hazard a cultural thought of the kind I don't know that Truthcraze would approve of in the case of AVH, I'd suggest the simplicity of The Kids versus The Hype conflict is already a bit nostalgic for the eighties, a time when individuals-sticking-it-to-commercial-behemoths plots were easier to articulate. The film Reality Bites (1994) captured the zeitgeist of young Americans of the 1990s trying to retain their cred in a culture that was beginning to facilitate the commodification of everything.
Such drama is not what AVH is about. It's about the eternal comedic struggles of being a teenager (well, eternal since the 1940s or so, so not very eternal at all, actually) and about the nineties version of them in particular. The player gets to control all four members of the band AardVarK at different times with a SWITCH TO (PERSON) command. The switching isn't bound up with complex puzzles. It's essentially for narrative purposes. These teens are boys and girls, punks, goths, would-be frontpeople, singers and guitarists. The nineties wack is clearest in their dialogue stylings. There is a ton of multi-option dialogue in AVH wracked with a mixture of self-consciousness and excitement as the teens try to blurt out their explanations of weird shenanigans and corporate shills.
It's not so much what the characters want to say to each other that changes across options, only how they're going to say it. Bravado, hostility, coolness, honest dorkiness and cluelessness are some of the modes the player can choose amongst. Just reading all the different options, including the 75% not chosen, makes for a good chunk of the comedy. There's rarely any revisiting of unpicked dialogue paths because the story and conversations are too busy screaming forward for that.
The seat of the game is a wonderful repeating set piece joke involving the Gas'n'Stop convenience store, a location that has been thoroughly plundered and destroyed by the time all the main PCs have abused it. There are also jock-guarded parties, night-time trees to be climbed, cars that are rocking, and condom-purchasing jokes executed in good taste. Furthermore, AVH has some cool tricks of delivery up its sleeve. One is the way it will suddenly override the player's typed commands with replacement evil ones if the current PC gets possessed by The Hype. Another occurs in a situation where the PC's car turns over, at which point some of the printed text does the same thing. I don't remember seeing that joke in a parser game before.
AVH is a game that wants to help you finish it. It has graded HINTs you can ask for, but it's constantly prompting for free anyway in an amusingly harried voice. I think part of this stems from the fact that it's trying (successfully) to create a sense of lively action, and having players stand around examining everything is anti-action. The game would rather remind you of the next thing you're meant to be doing than let you gawp. There's also a decent amount of fourth-wall-breaking, and its version of the parser voice versus character voice dance is a cute one. I hit some bugginess across the game (remember paragraph one: I am now hitting myself with a stick) but the only thing that actually tripped me up was a guess-the-verb moment which was cleared up by the HINTs.
I admit I'd have liked some more reinforcement of differentiation amongst the teens identities across the game, what with all the SWITCHing amongst them that goes on, but this isn't a major complaint for a story this funny and engaging. The victory scene, which felt felt rushed in the original IFComp version of the game, has also been updated to make it much more satisfying. While playing AVH, I laughed aloud a lot, admired the many forms of comedy wielded by the writing and loved the Gas'n'Stop situation.
- Kinetic Mouse Car, July 31, 2022
- E.K., November 22, 2021
- Spike, November 17, 2021
- Zape, November 13, 2021
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Rebel Yell, October 31, 2021You begin the game as Jenni, leader of a punk rock garage band, who is desperate to get to the practice space and breathlessly explain to her bandmates about some imminent disaster they must face together. I thought I knew where this game was going within the first couple of minutes, but then it immediately subverted my expectations. You then get to solve puzzles as different members of the band, all of which I found enjoyable and fair in terms of the level of challenge. I believe I only needed the walkthrough once, only because I didn't pay attention to a detail that was readily available. The mechanic that allows you to change which character you play as was cleverly implemented, and may be a unique feature. (Spoiler - click to show) I would have liked the ending to have been expanded a bit, perhaps putting more emphasis on the "power of music" conceit. Overall, I enjoyed getting to play as these characters, and I thought it was a pretty fun story.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Don’t drink the Zombie-ade!, October 23, 2021A crazy adventure about the four members of a high school garage band named AardVark and their antics as they try to thwart the purveyors of 'Hype', a weird new soda that has the property of turning ordinary teenagers into monosyllabic, shuffling zombies (whose parents might not be able to tell the difference). It’s variously madcap, silly, and comically horrific with a B-movie flavour, some witty writing and a cast of likeable characters whose relationships, insecurities and obsessions (sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and all the rest) accurately depict those of the average rebellious teenager. The game has a strong, linear narrative bookended by an early flashback sequence and an epilogue; the gameplay in-between is neatly compartmentalised into short episodes that need to be completed to progress and that flow fairly logically from one into the other. Altogether, the story works pretty well and kept me entertained throughout, although I found the ending a bit abrupt - a bit more could perhaps have been made of the final denouement, but curtailing the story at that point does at least ensure it falls neatly into the 2-hours-or-less bracket, playtime-wise (this being an IF comp game). A shame, perhaps, as I enjoyed it and would have been happy to play for longer.
However, there are a couple of problems with the game that, for me, took some of the shine off it. Firstly, the puzzles are sometimes a little illogical and / or poorly clued. This is game that really wants you to win: not only are the goals for each section helpfully listed in the status bar but also unsolicited nudges are liberally thrown at the player as soon as signs of hapless flailing are detected. In spite of that, I still found myself unable to divine that I needed to e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)insert the hot dog sausage into the crevice to distract the convenience store attendant, or (Spoiler - click to show)WEAR CONDOMS (really) to get past them and out of the store. Secondly, there are numerous implementation problems that are not only cosmetically displeasing but in some instances, negatively impact the gameplay. There are numerous typos, minor formatting errors and other oddities such as should-be-openable boxes and windows that aren’t "something that you can open", (Spoiler - click to show)a cord that can’t be tied to anything, even though you need it to climb a tree (just CLIMB TREE works) and null responses when trying to interact with a can of soda, amongst various other issues. In addition, there are a couple of places where such problems almost scupper the game altogether: namely (Spoiler - click to show)the shelf in the bedroom, that you are directed explicitly to search but can’t (it was only by looking at the hints that I learnt what was on there and could then get it, even though I hadn’t actually discovered the item by LOOKING ON or EXAMINING the shelf) and (Spoiler - click to show)the coffee-switching sequence in the Gas’N’Stuff where, somewhat infuriatingly, not only are more logical commands such as PUT HYPE IN COFFEE or POUR HYPE INTO COFFEE not implemented but the actual solution given in the in-game hints (SWITCH HYPE FOR COFFEE) is wrong! It’s actually SWITCH HYPE WITH COFFEE, as given in the walkthrough (if I hadn’t come across the answer there then I would probably have abandoned the game altogether at that point). Looking at the in-game credits, I see that some reliable people were involved in testing it, so I have to admit I’m slightly surprised that such issues made it into the final game. I can only assume that there were a lot more bugs in the beta version and what remains are the ones that weren’t picked up amongst all the others, or that the author ran out of time to fix everything. Whatever the case, it’s a shame that the conspicuous lack of polish makes the game a definite three stars for me, where it could so easily have been a solid four stars.
That being said, the game does have a charm that makes up for its infelicities and it delivers a satisfying experience overall. As a piece of amusing and silly escapism, it’s well worth the player’s time.
- Edo, October 21, 2021
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A multi-character parser game about defeating soda zombies, October 17, 2021Every IFComp brings with it some unusual coincidences. I find it fun that this comp has 2 different games (both enjoyable) where you have to assemble a rock band to stop another group from mind controlling people, and you have to use the power of music (the other game being Codex Sadistica).
This game uses a menu-based conversation system and allows you to switch freely between 3 main characters for much of the game.
You play as 4 kids who have a rock band at a school. The school and the whole town have been consumed by Hype, a new drink that turns you into a zombie!
You have to go on a series of wacky escapades to get all the stuff you need to defeat the monsters. Quests can be done in any order story-wise, but there is a definite chronology of which one happens first (which can be used to give yourself hints).
I found the game funny and well-conceived, but it had several parser hiccups I usually associate with games that haven't been tested well. My only assumption is that the game is so complex that some things slipped through. Examples include the (Spoiler - click to show)hype can in the second quests, which can get stuck in a state where most actions with it return no text at all; an uncapitalized standard response; the game telling you to look at (Spoiler - click to show)the shelf but there is no in-game object called that, etc. Besides that, I enjoyed this game a lot.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Funny misadventure while under the influence of a psychedelic soda, October 3, 2021This is a weird game. Not so much in that the gameplay itself is weird, more just that everything that happens is weird. These leads to a lot of laughs, but also some frustrations with the puzzles/parser. I would recommend a liberal use of the walkthrough for this game, as the enjoyment is more the story and dialogue, and less the puzzles. That said even the walkthrough itself (at least the one I used) got nonsensical towards the end, that or the author was playing one last joke on us, which is probably the case in retrospect.
Throughout the game you get to play the four members of the garage band AardVarK, sometimes forced to play one of the characters, but often being given the option to switch in between them at will. It begins with Jenni, the guitarist of the band, being exposed to a mind-altering soda being shilled at her high school campus, that seemingly turns all over her classmates into zombies. She must escape and, with the help of her bandmates, save the world! Thus the hijinks ensue.
As you can imagine this situation leads to all kind of weird encounters and interactions, many of them laugh-out-loud funny, as the band careens through this crisis on their way to saving the world with the power of rock'n'roll! The author does some fun things with the parser ((Spoiler - click to show)like replacing what you typed with a more zombie-like response at opportune moments), and some clever tricks with the interface ((Spoiler - click to show)like turning some text upside down - how was that programmed?! - with comedic timing). Also, the status bar at the top of the window was put to good use, making sure that you remember who you were playing and what your current task was, which was helpful during some confusing moments.
I can't say that I was a big fan of the puzzles though. Some of them involved kind of off-the-wall solutions that didn't make a ton of sense or follow a logical path. Some solutions were adjacent to the ones I came up with on my own, those kind you frequently find in parser games where you had the right idea, you were just typing the wrong words. Some solutions were hinted at very subtly and I missed the clues (though usually because I was enjoying the story at the point and not in detective mode), other puzzles it seemed like the solution was (Spoiler - click to show)just to wait long enough, literally typing "z" over and over again would do it, for the game to tell you exactly what to do. There were also a few minor implementation problems. All in all, the puzzle portion of the game I feel took me out of the rhythm of the story a bit, so again, use the walkthrough any time you feel yourself getting frustrated and enjoy the game more for the humor than anything else. Certainly worth your time.
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