Who Shot Gum E. Bear?

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).

Props to Who Shot Gum E. Bear? – it commits to the bit. In this absurdist detective-noir parody, you’re the one honest private dick (or Jane, actually) in a spun-sugar city where the candy-bar cast are as crooked as they are sweet, determined to crack the case of who offed the eponymous pop-rock-snorting bear. Your tools are a set of standard parser verbs, a willingness to poke your nose where it doesn’t belong (if you have a nose? X ME just says you’re “a street-smart broad with a hard sugar shell but a soft centre”, so like the green M&M maybe?), and the ability to ACCUSE any character of the crime (er, plus the bonus ability to UNDO if you happen to guess wrong).

It’d be easy for the film-noir business to overtake the parodic elements until they were just a layer of surrealism sprinkled lightly over a stale procedural plot, like so much powdered sugar. Bu the writing never lets you forget, in ways both PG and not. Here’s what you see when you peruse the wares at an, uh, adult bookshop:

"You’re never going to look at lollipops the same way again."

Eek.

There are some light puzzles to solve along the way, allowing you to access some locked areas on the small map, and opening up more people/treats to interrogate using a fairly robustly-implemented ASK/TELL ABOUT system. But lawnmowering your way through these will largely just rule out suspects and resolve ancillary mysteries. Success requires the player, not the protagonist, to make a realization, and if you don’t pay attention to the confectionary nature of your surroundings, your victim, and your suspect, you’ll never crack the case, which relies on the player being a careful, and clever, observer of events (or, again, trial-and-error via the UNDO function, not that I would know anything about that).

This gimmick wound up being my favorite part of the design, helping integrate the comedy with the gameplay. Who Shot Gum E. Bear is still rather slight; depending on how deep you want to get into everybody’s dialogue options before you figure out the answer/start spamming the ACCUSE command, you’re looking at ten or twenty minutes, and the mystery is as thin as the central-casting characters – the mob boss Don Toberlone, the tough-as-nails Jawbreaker, the femme fatale Candy Kane. But it’s amusing and clever, so I’m quite confident pronouncing it the best sweets-based murder-mystery of this or any Comp.