When You Were Shot By Elephants

Every IFComp, I come across a Personal Pick: a game that grabs me and speaks directly to the heart and/or brain in a surprising way, and that I end up liking more than most raters and reviewers. This year, When You Were Shot By Elephants was my Personal Pick. In the horse race of IFComp, it ran the wrong way at the starting line, but only because it had different goals than the other horses. I would like to scratch its forehead and give it a carrot.

Despite appearances, there’s actually quite a lot to do in this game. The walkthrough reveals that the testing commands were left on, so that’s one thing. All told I spent 2+ hours with this game, and I honestly felt very satisfied with my experience. I don’t know how much I should reveal about what I spent 2+ hours doing, but let’s just say I got a little trigger-happy and found something to spend 2+ hours on. Yes, I really did all that. No, I don’t recommend doing it. After all, this is a rather trollish game like everyone says (though not completely trollish: I believe the genre and all the content warnings are quasi-legitimate, unlike some other reviewers have speculated).

Anyway, eventually there was a moment at the end of Act 2 of Me Playing When You Were Shot By Elephants which the book Save the Cat would call the “Dark Night of the Soul.” Actually, I fully gave up. I thought, “This is a troll game and I see what it’s doing and it won’t fool me.”

And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I came back to it again and realized I was wrong about what I thought it was doing. And then I had another realization that probably wasn’t intended by the author but it was a nice moment of filling in the blanks a bit more. At the end, I even did a little dance. It honestly felt like an accomplishment.

After playing the original when i was shot by elephants series by no m3rcy, which this game is inspired by, I had a new appreciation for When You Were Shot By Elephants. For one thing, it’s a lot longer than the original games. It also improves on the original series with features like an elephant gun, a caravan, more than one room, additional lore, curse words, interactable elephants, and custom responses for commands like “xyzzy” and “eat elephants.”

So why did I only give this game four stars? Well, it is a trollish game with a lot of obstacles to enjoyable gameplay. In other words, too hard. But if I find out I missed something like a cool minigame, a substitution cipher, a hidden spectrogram, achievement trophies or secret endings, I will amend the record accordingly.