Renegade Brainwave

Played: 7/13/24
Playtime: 2.5hr, stuck, unfinished

If ever I WANTED to like a game more, I can’t think of it just now. This is a 50s B-Movie Space Horror spoof, with strong Ed Wood Jr connections. Stop already, I think I’m getting the vapors! The game has an insanely good ambient music/soundtrack just perfect for its theme. Seriously, it is a perfect mood setter, don’t even TRY to play without it. The work is also funny, from an endless parade of funny tombstone epitaphs, to your pugnaciously willful partner, to the bonkers plot turns, to just outright winning prose. A fave: “everything carvable has been carven to within an inch of structural collapse” In my first half hour I was gleefully giggling, romping from one area to another, just having a grand time. Then it came time to start solving puzzles.

Man do I wish puzzle play synched with me like literally every other aspect of the work. There are a relatively spartan nine areas whose midgame puzzles just slammed things to a crashing halt. I consider myself reasonably experienced in these things, but after two hours of no progress whatsoever, the charms of the piece kind of washed away in torrents of frustration. Consulting the location-sensitive hints were only marginally helpful, sometimes offering opaque hints, sometimes reinforcing what I WANTED to do with no pointer HOW, and other times just plain missing. Lots of seemingly arbitrary deaths, funny the first few times, defeating after great stretches of no progress. In desperation, I consulted prior reviews that helpfully pointed out that (Spoiler - click to show)if you give your bag-of-instant-death to your partner and let him open it, it will no longer kill you when you do so. No story justification, mind, no text cluing that this might work, and once accomplished no text stating it in fact did. The helpful review characterized that move as a bug, but honestly, I’m not sure how ELSE it could be accomplished, and for sure it was needed to solve multiple puzzles! I blundered forward for a while after that, starting to make some progress, then again ran aground with no more internet help to guide me.

There are other, more traditional, buggy behaviors - text that addresses the partner before he arrives on scene; objects that should be consumed reappearing without comment - but these are exactly the kind of things that are easily forgiven in works that sing, and SO not the problem in works that make me struggle.

It doesn’t help that I tried SO SO MANY THINGS in the meantime that just didn’t work. Catching fireflies for light! Begging my partner to use his lighter! Wearing a helmet to avoid toxic fumes! Using objects as reach extenders! So many different gorilla entreaties! These are not spoilers, as none of them worked. It was the more frustrating because there was one puzzle I really liked, and tumbled into in what felt a ‘normal’ problem solving flow. I also seemed to be assembling some fun, intriguing pieces towards endgame, currently unemployed. I am forced to conclude that as on-my-vibe as this was in EVERY ASPECT BUT ONE, that one aspect we were just completely disconnected, this work and I.

It makes me unutterably sad that THIS game, of all games, rejected my puzzle-solving advances so resoundingly. A prohibitively opaque High Fantasy Cat People V Broccoli People RPG would not produce this level of regret in me. At this point, after slogging 2.5hrs in, it is pretty clear the relationship problem is not the game, it’s me. I’m in pain now, but with time I hope I can find it in me to become friends again.