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Review Sans Context - Deceptive or Merely Unhelpful?, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
WARNING. The following review comes from a place of ignorance. As a recent entrant into IF culture, I had no clue Stiffy Makane existed, let alone its storied position in the IF corpus. As such, the following review evaluates Citizen Makane as a stand alone work, devoid of any of the context that gives it life and meaning. I accept your 'unhelpful' judgements unreservedly. I have also elected not to include my rating in the game's average for this reason.
This happened to me last year also. At some point in the IFComp, when you have achieved a critical mass of gameplay, the brain shifts gears from “Hm, let me objectively dissect this,” to “Hm, this bears the most superficial resemblance to Z, let me dwell on that!” It doesn’t help in this case that I self-importantly had this to say in my review of Ribald Bat Lady:
"The sex scenes themselves were also employed unevenly. They were most successful when erotic activity was actually incorporated into the gameplay as puzzles."
“What’s that you say? Noted!” said the author, somehow hearing this ill-considered advice through a temporal wormhole and acting on it in time for IFCOMP23. The setup is: you are a man, awakened from cryo-sleep to an all-female world, for the purpose of reintroducing heterosexual sex to the species. Kind of an ur-porn-plot. You do this by becoming Sex Yu-Gi-Oh.
If you take out the sex, as a game, it has implementation issues. It is spare, the map is small and limiting. Objects have almost random permanence (sometimes the food I ordered the previous day was still on my table in the cafe! other times not). The conversation system is limiting, repetitive and clunky, and often provides options that the game rejects when selected. The puzzles (again, talking the non-sex version of this game) are few and pretty straightforward. Its most egregious fault though is its screen management. It often throws giant walls of text at you, which scroll to the bottom. Requiring you to scroll back to read it all. As the game progresses, and your in-window text grows and grows, it becomes increasingly fiddly to scroll just the right amount. With the ubiquitous, decades-old availability of the [More] technology it is a baffling, infuriating choice.
When it does try to manage text pacing, it creates different issues for itself. There are times when conversations, or tv shows, or lectures happen around you. If you are inclined to listen in, you must wait as they play out block by block. Not great, but not terrible. But the messages you get… you get to hear some pretty horrific things, and:
"The professor continues. "In the late 21st century, unspoken tensions between
the sexes started turning into open hostilities, and finally culminated in a
series of devastating conflicts known as the Gender Wars. It was a terrible
bloodbath, raging for decades, with immense losses on both sides."
>z
You relax.
That is the most awful response to that news! The other message is “you chill” which actually could be read as ‘get the chills’ so that would have been a bit better?
Now, let’s get that sex back in (that’s what SHE… NO! Actually, that feels kind of inevitable). There is a battle-card based sex minigame that needs to be grinded (ground? it all sounds bad in context) to get your physical prowess to a game-ending level. There is like one, maybe two nuances to it that are apparent after two plays. After that it is the most eye-glazing, mechanical exercise imaginable. And you need to do it A LOT. There is a read of this game that its mini-game implementation and shallow character work are a next level PARODY of dire porn games. There is ample evidence to support that here, including nearly interchangeable random partners, wafer-thin foreplay, and ubiquitous sexual availability. To me though, it reads like it kind of wants to have it both ways - like watching porn ‘ironically.’
[Sidebar: in our post-satire world, is it even POSSIBLE to parody porn? Is there anything so exaggerated and extreme that there isn’t a corner of the internet that wouldn’t embrace it at face value?]
Man, my grip on my pearls got a bit tight. So let’s talk about two things the game does almost exactly right. The first is it’s protagonist’s alternating ‘please don’t pinch me if I’m sleeping’/‘you’re sure this is ok?’ attitude to his situation. Often played for laughs, and lands more often than not. The second though… hoo boy. During your mini-games you are treated to descriptions of the sex that are just the most inappropriate, offputting, and HILARIOUS phrasing. I grabbed A TON, but they are the game’s super power so to just get the flavor:
Some of the ways sex is described is (para) (Spoiler - click to show)“like that one guy clapping too loud” “like an elephant marching in an empty theatre” “like a spaghetti on the floor getting inhaled by a vacuum cleaner” “LIKE A FISH BEING SLAPPED ON A ROCK” and so so many more.
Despite the limited mini-gameplay, these blurbs more often than not justified the effort. It is actually worth the price of admission just to experience all that. Even after topping out my stats, I would sometimes engage the mini-game just to refresh my good will. Really. That’s why I did it. For sure.
In the end, I think I call the humor a single Spark albeit a bright one. Not enough to escape Mechanical gameplay, but more than enough to sweeten the pot since I was playing anyway. I go back and forth on whether the scrolling issue pushes it from Notably to Intrusively glitchy. I’m staying with Notably, but there is an argument to be made.
Played: 10/27/23
Playtime: 2 hrs, level 5, 1/3 quests complete
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notable
Would Play After Comp?: No, despite not finishing I think I’m done (that’s what she…WOULD YOU STOP THAT??)
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless