When You Were Shot By Elephants

As the parent to a soon-to-be-five-year-old, I’ve had occasion to reflect on the dilemma faced by the creators of movies and TV for little kids: they’re almost always going to be watched by both the target audience as well as their parents, so how do you cater to those wildly different demographics? Often, the approach is to keep the main thrust of the story and action at a child’s level, but throw in some jokes and references for the older crowd that will go way over the kids’ heads (so to speak): your Velvet Underground covers in Shrek, or Buster Keaton homages in the latest Minions movie. The better stuff, though, doesn’t bifurcate things nearly so cleanly, instead telling stories that work for everybody, even if grown-ups and kids relate to them differently: for my son, the characters in Toy Story are toys whose job it is to make sure the kid they belong to is always happy, but for me and my wife, they look a lot like parents fretting over their child.

When You Were Shot by Elephants is not meant for children, despite the fact that the most over-the-top elements of the content warnings don’t appear to be in evidence in the game (sidenote: jokey CWs are a lame trick to pull, you should never do this), but it faces a similar dilemma: it’s a jokey fan-homage to a series of trollish games from the middle years of the Obama administration, and inasmuch as the most-played one of the group has 11 ratings, it’s fair to say that the author must have assumed that some of not most of the Comp audience wouldn’t have played the originals. So what strategy did they take to make sure everybody can enjoy themselves regardless?

Unfortunately, that was a trick question, because when I was laying out that taxonomy of kids’ shows, I left out a third category: those that are just for toddlers and thumb their noses at the idea that adults could possibly enjoy them (I’m looking at you, Paw Patrol). And When You Were Shot by Elephants defiantly takes this tack. I’m looking forward to reviews by folks who get the specific riffs the current game makes – hopefully they’re hilarious – but for those of us who don’t get the specific references, this is pretty thin gruel.

The idea here is that you’re an elephant (armed with an elephant gun, natch) whose goal is to shoot the player before any of the other elephants in the neighborhood can do the deed. You wander through an intentionally-confusing map more or less at random while the player does the same; sometimes they blunder into you and you can shoot them, sometimes another elephant does the deed first. You get a point if you succeed in ambushing the player, at which point they respawn and you can repeat the process. Sometimes the player UNDOes their action, though that doesn’t really make much difference. There’s not anything else to do, so far as I can tell – shooting the other elephants doesn’t appear to work, though the response is kind of confusing, and you’re not even allowed to examine the vanishingly few pieces of scenery (though since only thing notable about the authorial voice is that it likes to curse, this isn’t much of a loss). Maybe there are secret depths revealed for those who are willing to ride this particular merry-go-round longer than the half-dozen spins I took before giving up, but if there are, I can honestly say the game didn’t seem especially interested in providing me an incentive to do so.

Not all games need to be for all players, of course, and I sincerely hope that people who got a laugh out of the original games in between watching the first Avengers movie and celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee enjoy this one just as much. But as for me, I’d actually rather be watching Paw Patrol.