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Review
The one-way street I live on dead-ends at a busy four-lane road onto which I frequently have to turn left (the US equivalent of the game’s UK right turn). Often, as I’m sitting there waiting for this to be possible, some jerk in an unnecessarily large vehicle will get impatient and try to go around me, although the street is not really designed for that. Of course, the reason I’m just sitting there is because there are no openings, so the overly large vehicle will just sit there for a while blocking my view of traffic, and then take the first opening that comes along before I can get to it, even though I was there first!!!
When a similar incident happened in Turn Right, I may have started yelling out loud. Just a little.
This short parser game simulates the experience of attempting to turn right onto a busy road. I’ve been vocal over the years about my dislike of games that simulate boring and/or frustrating experiences, but Turn Right’s spot-on observational humor makes it work. At first, out of some sort of contrarian instinct, I tried everything I could think of besides what the game wanted me to do, but while it was all implemented, the responses were terse enough that I gave in and committed to my fate of repeatedly trying TURN RIGHT. I was then rewarded with a surprisingly varied set of exasperating events, related in wry tones. (Although I am glad I tried (Spoiler - click to show)examining the car park and saw that the van responsible for the aforementioned incident was taking up two parking spaces, foreshadowing that the driver was an asshole.)
I did experience a touch of cultural dissonance; you see, I’m from Boston, and to get anywhere in this godforsaken city, you have to drive aggressively. So on one of the several occasions when someone in the near lane stopped to try to let the PC through, I would have just barged on out there on the assumption that someone on the far lane would let me through sooner rather than later once I was conspicuously blocking traffic. But I understand that in most of the US, to say nothing of the rest of the world, people are too polite for that sort of thing.
Turn Right is probably not nearly as funny to people who don’t drive, but I would recommend it to anyone who does.
