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Review
“Everything in war is very simple,” Clausewitz tells us, “but the simplest thing is difficult.” The same is true in the business world, posits Ultraviolent Unicorn Deathmatch of Destiny 4, especially if you’re a quadruped with poor coordination, worse impulse control, and a giant chainsaw where your horn should be.
UUDD4 is identifiably of a piece with comedy games like QWOP or Octodad, where the joke is that you’re trying to do something relatively straightforward, but the controls are completely unintuitive and overtuned, so you wind up flopping wildly about and crashing into the scenery, the floor, and everyone around you as you attempt to run down a straight track or open a door. It’s a funny gag, but if you asked me whether you could translate it into parser IF, I would have suspected you were making fun of me. Shows what I know! The secret sauce is the way game adopts the single-press extension Arthur DiBianca has used to good effect to streamline some of his recent limited-parser games, and reimagines it as a source of mayhem.
See, every single letter on your keyboard does something, and what they do isn’t intuitive. Sure, the shortcuts for compass directions work as usual, so getting around is straightforward, but after that things get wacky: K for kick is reasonable enough, I suppose, but almost every other key on the keyboard causes your quite-large equine to wreak havoc with hooves, teeth, eye-beams, or that terrifying chainhorn. Crucially, the game doesn’t provide a cheat-sheet informing you of what key does what, so the only way to understand the 26 tools at your disposal is to try them out, which will inadvertently lead to some horrible, horrible things happening to those bystanders unfortunate enough to be in the background as you experiment (we don’t talk about the receptionist, we don’t talk about the receptionist…) And then you’ll have to play out the same process again many times over, as you try to actually solve the puzzles.
The writing, unsurprisingly for Damon Wakes, is hilarious, going into enough detail to communicate the level of chaos you are inadvertently creating while lightly gliding over the potential horror (seriously, that poor receptionist). And the design is very well put together too – the map is just big enough to get you a bit turned around, the puzzles just hard enough that you won’t get them right on the first try, and the number of things you have to do just long enough to really put the joke through its paces without wearing out its welcome. I won’t spoil any of the tasks you wind up taking on, but they’re an inspired bunch, all totally reasonable things one does at the office and pretty much all ticking time-bombs. It’s great fun to roll up into a new location, realize there’s something you can do here to check an item off your quest list, but simultaneously see the ways things could go horribly wrong if you try the wrong thing. And try the wrong thing you will, because the list of possible actions is too long to hold in your head so you’ll probably slip up even if you don’t make any typos, and the solutions are sometimes just complicated enough that the first thing you try won’t work, or won’t work yet, and so off to the races it’ll be.
The critique of UUDD4 is that it’s really just a collection of individual set-pieces; there’s not even a persistent inventory, and while there are a few places where what order you do things matters (for example, various of the available verbs won’t work if you haven’t eaten or drank anything lately, and no, I’m not going to elaborate), for the most part there’s no interdependence of anything you do, save for a ticker at the top of the screen displaying the dollar value of all the damage you’ve caused so far. Similarly, there’s not really a climax, with your encounter with the boss of the whole company being a big nothingburger, and the game actually ending only when you choose to walk out the front door, satisfied that your work here is done. Still, when the set-pieces are this inspired, that’s hardly much of a critique – for a game built around a single one-note gag, UUDD4 really commits to the bit.
