A Smörgåsbord of Pain

I have to start this review with a confession: according to IFDB, I did play this game’s predecessor, A Matter of Heist Urgency, but I have barely any memory of it. This is not the game’s fault; my “IFComp 2022 reviews” document is conspicuously lacking any actual reviews and I seem to have stopped even recording my scores there after the first few games, so clearly I was going through something that year, although I also don’t really remember what.

So due to this mysterious IFComp 2022 amnesia, I approached A Smorgasbord of Pain as one unfamiliar with the ways of Anastasia the Power Pony. The first scene, in which you seem to be talking to some work friends about the events of the previous game (while not letting on your role in them, of course) had me a bit at sea, but whatever else one can say about the game, it moves along at a brisk pace (a canter, at least, if not a gallop) and soon I was being chased through a buffet and learning a bit about the combat system by fighting thugs in an alley. I had to redo the fight a couple times, but picked it up relatively quickly.

After a quick breather in which you get more coaching on the combat system and a little more background on the heroine, there’s a trip to a warehouse in which you rescue the heroic but hapless fellow superhero Ponyheart, and then it’s back to the buffet again for an all-out brawl with many members of the llama mafia that appears to be Anastasia’s main foe.

I had gotten into a decent groove with the game at this point, but the second buffet fight pulled me up short. See, instead of relying on the combat system that’s been used up to this point, you’re expected to take down the llamas with food-based puns (the example given in the tutorial for this bit is RAM WITH RAMEN, although it also seems to consider rhyming to be sufficiently punny). I don’t know if it’s a matter of being unprepared for it, having too different an accent to the writer, or just being really bad at puns, but although I’ve done a creditable job with many rhyme-based wordplay games in the past, my performance here was abysmal. I came up with one (1) pun and was thoroughly beaten by criminal camelids. (You can just use normal attacks in this scene, but as far as I could tell they were much less effective.)

I wanted to replay the fight, as I had done with the alleyway thugs earlier, but the game threw an error when I tried. Fortunately, it’s also an option to move on while accepting your defeat, and the suboptimal ending I got still seemed to be classed as a winning one even if the llamas got away.

Action is hard to do in IF, and I think this game does a surprisingly solid job with it, between its vivid writing, simple but engaging combat system, and refusal to let a scene go on too long. And I recognize the pun combat as a way to spice up something that might get a bit stale if you have to do too much of it (since, as mentioned, there’s not too much complexity to the combat), and if it had clicked with me I can imagine having a great time with it. Maybe that would even have happened on my second go-round if I’d gotten one. As things stood, the frustration of the food fight knocked my enjoyment down a few notches. But the premise is entertaining and ambitious and the series does do some things especially well, so I would certainly try a third installment—hopefully with my memory of this one intact this time.