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Atrocitronby Michael Martin profileEpisode 5 of Annoyotron 2016 Joke Inform 6
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(based on 1 rating)
1 review — 3 members have played this game. It's on 3 wishlists.
A puzzlebox text game that’s half prank and half puzzle-hunt artifact.
I love that IFDB classifies the Atrocitron -- correctly -- as a joke. At the risk of ruining it in explanation, it's many things at once: an end-run around the Zarfian cruelty scale; an attempt to redeem an incoherent gameworld with bulletproof implementation; an abstraction of the monopuzzle at the heart of certain story-heavy favorites; and an experiment in keeping players at a distance that they might more fully apprehend the whole.
Reviewing comp games in 2015, Martin wrote that the best interactive works engage us in two ways, as audience and as performers. The Atrocitron exaggerates the contradiction between these roles, deliberately repulsing its audience to demand pure performance; a transcript would read to the uninitiated like a glitched speedrun of some bizarre prototype. It falls to the preface to do the work of the overture in establishing motivation: theory in place of story. ("Seriously, type ABOUT.")
The game does for Annoyotron what Mentula Macanus did for Stiffy Makane and, like Mentula Macanus, it's not for everyone. But I'd recommend it in particular to fans of (e.g.) Byzantine Perspective or Fifteen Minutes.
My new walkthroughs for November 2020 by David Welbourn
On Saturday November 28, 2020, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for...