AardVarK Versus the Hype

This 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.