HEN AP PRAT GETS SMACKED IN THE TWAT

DICK MCBUTTS GETS PUNCHED IN THE NUTS famously is two games in one. As part of author Damon Wakes’s successful plot to win the Golden Banana of Discord, it cunningly rolled an invisible set of dice upon boot-up, and depending on the result slotted the player into either a short, obnoxiously-linear vignette focusing on genital trauma with co-starring roles by Hitler, Darth Vader, and copious vomiting, or a longer, still-obnoxious but not linear scenario featuring better jokes and much less flashing text (I got the first, and hate/loved it). I’m not sure whether the sequel, ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, took the same approach, but this third game goes it one better: I’ve heard people confirm that there’s a similar random sorting of players into either a short, linear version or a longer, more robust one, but even having gotten the latter this time out, I’m confronted with a duality: is this a lackluster DICK MCBUTTS sequel, or an elegant DICK MCBUTTS subversion?

Some grounding in what the thing actually is may (but only may) help answer that question. This time out our protagonist is HEN AP PRAT, a Welsh (I think?) trans woman who’s aware of the title of her game and despite acknowledging the ridiculousness of the prediction (since she does not, at least as the game opens, possess the requisite piece of anatomy), locks herself in her apartment and turns to arts cartomantica to fend off her destiny. The game is in DendryNexus rather than Twine, which allows the card-reading conceit to be rendered quite nicely: you deal yourself a hand of three tarot cards, and clicking on one fires you into a zany vignette that typically involves some form of transformation and/or threat to your groin. Some are branching storylets, others are linear, some appear to lead inevitably to a bad end while others are entirely safe, and some get away from the series’ core conceit that getting kicked in the crotch is funny by redefining what being SMACKED IN THE TWAT even means, like maybe it’s just “twat” like the British slang for someone being kinda clueless, you know? (these are the least funny ones). But make no mistake: play for long enough, and one way or another, the title fulfills itself eventually.

There are a number of things one can say about all this. One is that it’s not as funny as its predecessors. Oh, many of the same ingredients are there, like a rotating cast of supporting characters with similarly-constructed names, and wild leaps across genre and plausibility. And there certainly are some jokes that landed for me, like this bit:

"At the reception to the clinic - which is typically small, drab and mean-spirited, the seats composed of the severed left halves of benches collected from a gallery of brutalists’ responses to the prompt “imagine a tramp says out loud ‘at least it can’t get any worse’ and then sees your work” and the walls decorated with posters of that homophobic dog meme saying shit like “I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE” and “THIS IS THE PART WHERE HE SMACKS YOU” - Hen gives her name to the receptionist, clarifies that it’s her real name even though the receptionist didn’t think it wasn’t, then decides she’s better off just standing in the corner of the waiting room to wait."

But the humor typically earned a smile rather than the impossible-to-control chortles of the first games. For all the ridiculousness, the effective comic bits tend to be like this one, more observational, which is new ground for the series – when HEN AP PRAT tries to go big, it just feels like a shadow of its predecessors, going over old gags to diminishing returns. The presentation also makes a big difference; I missed the Geocities-aping blinking lights and colored text, whose garishness made a better accompaniment for the DICK MCBUTTS humor than the understated class of DendryNexus’s basic black. Speaking of DendryNexus, the storylet structure means there’s not much of a sense of progression, as you could potentially play any card at any time – a big departure from the delightful escalations that marked prior installments, with near-misses piling up one after another and plot twists turning things this way and that, before the whole Jenga tower collapses; some of the vignettes attempt similar moves here, but they just don’t have the runway they need to be as effective.

The biggest issues, though, are that 1) unlike the feel-good comedy of a dude wincing in pain as someone thwacks him in the junk, a woman being kicked in the genitals is unpleasant to contemplate, given the prevalence of gender-based and sexual violence in the real world; and 2) that gets dialed up to a thousand when the woman is a trans woman, given that they’re targeted for violence at even higher rates, not to mention that there’s an entire right-wing movement that’s attempting to institute global fascism largely on the basis of a fetishistic obsession with trans peoples’ genitals. When we’re told that Hen huddles in her apartment, afraid of other people because of the risk of sexual violence, that isn’t a fun premise for a comedy game, that’s real life.

So yeah, as a DICK MCBUTTS game, HEN is a bummer. But, is that what it is? Beyond the already-mentioned DendryNexus of it all, HEN is also attributed to Larissa Janus, rather than the first two game’s Hugh. There’s a family resemblance, of course (I’m guessing she goes by Lar), but might we entertain the hypothesis that a different author, or at least a different authorial persona, is making a different point, and in fact using some of the underpinnings of the series to raise some pointed questions – like, asking the player to engage with how they feel when the threat of groin-assault is leveled against people of different genders and with different genitals, and maybe take that to other experiences of gender identity. Or just noting how, for Hen, acquiring a vagina is a dreadful thing that carries with it a promise of violence, which can come at any moment, from any direction, in fact is guaranteed to come. On that reading, some of the queasiness I mentioned above is the point.

I don’t mean to say that HEN is overly dour – this is still a game where one flip of a card can turn you into She-Ra, after all. But “it’s less funny” might not be the damning judgment it would be if the game was just trying to be a gag-filled sequel; if HEN is DICK MCBUTTS 3, it’s only so-so, but if it’s NEMESIS MCBUTTA instead, well, that’s something else entirely.

PS: Oh yeah, and that whole ORIGIN OF THE WORLD subtitle is pretty interesting too, huh? No subtitles for the other two DICK MCBUTTS games, much less one that recalls Courbet’s pornographic provocation, a painting that pointedly exchanges the politely-hairless nudes of the artistic establishment with a vagina drawn from, and to, life.