Slugocalypse

This is a game that I like, but which I feel could have been quite a bit longer.

It's got fun illustrations, an enjoyable premise (giant slugs attack everything), and the beginnings of inventory- and location-based puzzles.

But then it's over so quickly. It's 10,000 words, and you don't see most of those because it branches a lot.

In a way, it's kind of like Dungeon Detective 1 last year. I liked that game, too, but it was also too short, and the author made a bigger sequel (Dungeon Detective 2) this year that was much longer, and I loved it.

If anything, I just want more of this. Would love to play more games by this author.

I enjoyed the fiction of Slugocalypse very much. It’s like an upbeat Day of the Triffids or a less gory Living Dead installment. It’s the end of the world, with slugs. It introduces you to an environment, introduces conflict into that environment, and then keeps things moving until the conflict is resolved.

I enjoyed this game’s presentation and interactivity, as well. It uses images and music, and I was quite happy to see a Twine game that hadn’t gone with the default white-text-on-black color scheme.

There are a few options for exploration in the game (and maybe this is a branch-and-bottleneck structure?) that allow you to carefully examine your environment for clues about the disaster or just run like hell and try to survive. In my playthroughs, there seemed to be far fewer jump scares than you’d experience in something like a Resident Evil game, and I appreciated that.

I didn’t need anywhere near an hour to get through it, although I only found two of the three endings