The Mayor and the Machine

[Time to completion: 15-20 mins]

You are the mayor of the hilariously named Buttsville and, as you deal with the various problems (like the city breaking down around you), there’s a mysterious tool, left to you by your predecessor. A button that allows direct contact to… the Authority. How much will you rely on that omniscient, omnipotent force?

For such a jokey setup, most of the game is quite earnest in following through all the awful things that can happen to a city.

One playthrough is relatively short, but with frequent branching and checkpoints, it’s quite replayable.

This Shufflecomp game is about a mayor who encounters a linear sequence of obstacles. Each obstacle has the exact same set of options to use when encountering it. The game's three endings don't depend on any one of the obstacles; instead, the ending you get depends on your overall pattern of choices.

The writing is silly at times (the first few pages include Buttsville and Poop Lake), but this is justified in-game, and in fact the silliness is an inherent part of the games plot.

The scenarios the mayor faces were actually compelling, and on the first play through I really though about the effect it would have on the city. There was a surprising number of scenarios to go through as well. This helps keep the game from getting monotonous, as opposed to The House at the end of Rosewood Street, where a similar list of repetitive tasks was extremely tedious.