Slappy Squirrel Gets The Girl

For decades, one of the standard critiques of adventure game puzzles is that they can operate on cartoon logic. It’s a brave move by Slappy Squirrel Gets the Girl, then, to steer into the skid: one the one hand, having a game that’s literally in a Looney-Toons style cartoon means that slapstick doesn’t create tonal clashes with the rest of the game, but on the other hand, there’s a very real risk of frustration if players aren’t thinking outside the box in exactly the right way. Fortunately, the game nails its premise, offering up clever twists on classic scenarios that prompt you towards solutions while maintaining a healthy level of difficulty, and make plenty of room for funny gags along the way.

The precise setup here is one of the oldest in video-game-dom – someone nefarious has kidnapped your girlfriend for underspecified reasons – but what you’re really doing is wandering around looking for anything shaped like a puzzle, in the confidence that that will eventually get you where you’re going. The early stages are more directed, as you’re confined to a small area of the map until you figure out how to reach the city where your paramour disappeared, but once things open up there are pretty long puzzle chains to be traversed before you pick up the thread of the plot again. And that works fine, since in a cartoon short the mayhem in the middle is the point.

Again, it helps that the scenarios are nicely chosen to prompt the player to act – if you see a safe dangling in the middle of the street, hanging by only a fraying rope, or a parasol next to a near-bottomless pit, you don’t need to have mainlined cartoons to guess what you should be doing. While there are maybe one or two that could fit in just about any parser game (I don’t remember Bugs Bunny doing anything so straightforward as prying up a grate with a crowbar), they’re very much the exceptions from the inspired set of challenges on offer. You can die – though nothing a couple UNDOs won’t solve – and I think there’s at least one way to get yourself into an unwinnable situation, albeit it’s near the start and you need to do something that’s fairly obviously unwise. But I didn’t mind this flirtation with cruelty, because it’s part of how the game balances approachability with challenge: there are some tricky puzzles (I actually needed a hint to figure out exactly how to deal with that cliff, though it was reasonably clued in retrospect) so the game wants to make sure you’re thinking about what you’re doing.

As I also mentioned, Slappy Squirrel actually is funny, too. I really enjoyed the name of one of your neighbors, which is an off-brand riff on Pepe LePew, and the game never misses a chance to indulge in a cartoon trope, like emphasizing how background scenery keeps getting reused or how the world disappears as you get near the horizon past which the artists haven’t drawn anything. It’s also well implemented, with the only tiny bug I ran into setting up the biggest laugh of the game. Here was how the ending text was displayed:

"Congratulations, you have saved the girl and joined the ranks of the greatest romantic couples in toon history.
(first dropping the vacuum cleaner hose)"

That kind of intrusion of chaos into narrative is characteristic of both cartoons and IF – and Slappy Squirrel Gets the Girl what good things can happen when that convergence isn’t run from, but embraced.