Mento's May Madness Melange: #8 - Quick Look Champions

Today I'm checking out three games that were brought to my attention due to memorably funny Giant Bomb Quick Looks. At least that's the official stance I'm taking. Off the record, I'm trying to clear out some of my stupider adventure games, so think of this as a sequel to Melange #5 if you'd prefer.

I feel I'm probably like most of you (but not all, I can appreciate) in that I view the site's Quick Looks as entertainment first, education second. I've been around this big virtual world of ours enough times to be able to tell within a few minutes of video (or heck, images from the back of the box, if we're going further back prior to the internet age) whether or not a game is for me, and so I spend most of a QL's runtime hoping for some chuckles with some of the funniest duders the industry has to spare. While I like the following three games plenty as is, as far as I'm concerned they justified their existence with the priceless QL moments they spawned.

Angelica Weaver: Catch Me When You Can

The game: MumboJumbo's Angelica Weaver: Catch Me When You Can, an hidden object adventure game.

The source: Groupees' Be Mine 9.

The pre-amble: Angelica Weaver is a detective with the Chicago police, with one particular trick up her sleeves: a mystic power that allows her to see into the past and observe murders as they happen. By using this gift, she is able to gather evidence and find the identify of the Cicero Slasher serial killer, even if it means occasionally hopping back a century or so to look for clues.

Angelica Weaver's one of a very, very large crowd of "casual" hidden object adventure games. When I say hidden object, there's a specific set-up that springs to mind: a static screen filled with junk and a shopping list of items to find, with each one getting ticked off the list once found in the scene. Those scenarios only comprise around a third of Angelica Weaver's puzzles, however: most are the usual inventory puzzles we've seen in adventure games since time immemorial, and there's even a few Layton-esque brainteasers thrown in for good measure.

Here's the Quick Look.

The playthrough: Well, if you remember the Quick Look as vividly as I do (or just watched it via the link) you might recall how ridiculous this game is, from its high-concept premise down to its imbecilic puzzle contrivances. Though these games usually provide some farfetched reason for why you'd want to run around picking through a hoarder's bedroom, a detective that can go back in time with the power of, oh, I dunno, dreamcatchers I guess, might require an unassailable suspension of disbelief. The Quick Look got a lot of mileage in particular out of the extremely goofy jump scares, such as that brick flying in through a window from nowhere, and the various dumb means the game had for giving you a required item after solving a puzzle, such as an industrial loom in someone's garage that just inexplicably burps up another brick. These bricks are then, of course, required for a sudoku puzzle that the murderer painted on the wall in ultraviolent ink. Because why wouldn't they?

So yeah, it's another hidden object game, albeit one that isn't just an egregious waste of time thanks to its preposterous silliness. Its earnest attempts at being a bit eerie and mysterious are where most of the inadvertent hilarity comes into play, but the parts that are just straight up adventure game shenanigans are actually all right, if unremarkable. The game's far too easy for its own good, except for the few occasions where a giant leap in logic is required, and the game's happy to provide as many hints as you need via collectible dreamcatchers. I beat it in an afternoon, if that tells you anything about how straightforward most of it is (or how unwisely I'm choosing to spend my afternoons, for that matter).

I dunno. I generally don't like railing against hidden object games because they're very clearly not built for me, but for casual gamers who want to spend a bit of time with something breezy and uncomplicated for a few minutes before going about their day. It's also worth noting that because I play so very few games of this type, there's no way for me to tell how Catch Me When You Can might stack up in comparison. It's not going to compare with games like Primordia or The Book of Unwritten Tales, given the cursory narrative elements and simple item hunt puzzles, but it's not like I wouldn't have found a way to waste those hours some other way. I'm sounding overly dismissive, but Angelica Weaver is just inoffensive, garden-variety point-and-clickery with a few absurd gimmicks that are worth a chuckle or two. It's not bad, but it's probably not worth adding to the ol' Steam wishlist either.

The verdict: I beat it, so there's no need to go back. Indeed, everything in this scene has been found.

Edna and Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes

The game: Daedalic Entertainment's Edna and Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes, a macabre adventure game.

The source: I... oh, I bought this one off Steam directly in a sale? That's unusual for me.

The pre-amble: Edna and Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes is a story about a well-behaved little girl at a convent school, Lilli, and the various people in her life that make her miserable. The one person who brightens her day is her best friend Edna, and after Edna discovers that a menacing psychologist from her past is coming to the convent school, she pleads with Lilli to help her escape. Lilli, being as polite and good-natured as she is, can't say no, even if it does result in a little collateral damage...

Edna and Harvey is a fairly traditional adventure game: you grab items, check hotspots, solve puzzles and progress the story by any means possible.

Here's the Quick Look.

The playthrough: Wow, is this game dark. It's definitely got a few Grimm's Fairy Tales vibes, and a big helping of the Addams Family in addition (some of its music seems eerily reminiscent of the Addams Family movie's soundtrack). The Quick Look stops shortly after your fellow student "Freeman" mysteriously vanishes after playing near the well, and you're quickly introduced to a whole school full of colorful characters (like the anime-obsessed popular girls, and the local mean boys) that you go about systematically murdering completely incidentally. I hesitate to even call it a spoiler, because this is only the first chapter of the game.

Honestly, and I'm making this sound more incredible than it actually is, the game starts becoming more interesting after you're done annihilating schoolchildren. The Harvey of the title, he of the new eyes, is actually a malevolent stuffed rabbit that the antagonist of the game, Dr Marcel, uses to hypnotise Lilli into being a good girl or otherwise suffer psychological torment. Each of these hypnotic suggestions are fairly common rules for children -- no playing with fire, no playing in dangerous places, no disobeying adults -- that, at some point or another, the player is going to have to contravene in order to solve the next puzzle or reach the next part of the story. In each case, you're sent into a trance-like dreamworld created from Lilli's own psyche and required to complete a little self-contained puzzle that allows you to overcome that specific mental block, after which you are freely able to ignore it and complete any goals it was impeding. It's a novel little system that creates some really bizarre scenarios in Lilli's mental scape. The game goes out of its way quite a few times to suggest that Lilli might not necessarily be entirely sane.

I'm enjoying this one. Like Daedalic's other game that I've played this month, which would be The Whispered World, the game has a handy function key that highlights every hotspot in the area, and it's adopted the now standard contextual cursor, which changes to two possible functions (usually "examine" and an interaction of some kind) that correspond to the two standard mouse buttons. Holding it over an item, say, will transform the cursor to look like a hand on the left and an eye on the right, making it obvious which button you're meant to click for which effect. It's a considerably more streamlined process than The Whispered World's little menu of options, and I'm finding I'm enjoying this game's dark humor more than The Whispered World's dark... well, everything.

The verdict: It might mean adding yet another half-finished adventure game to the pile of games to get through once May Madness has concluded, but I want to see where this game goes. These mental block puzzles (which thankfully have nothing to do with sliding block puzzles) seem like an interesting addition, and so far I'm really liking the game's truly sinister sense of humor.

McPixel

The game: Sos's McPixel, a comedic trial-and-error puzzle adventure game. Kinda.

The source: Huh, bought this one too. For like a buck.

The pre-amble: McPixel almost defies definition. It certainly defies sense. The player is the rugged, bemulleted, psychotic adventurer and secret agent McPixel, not to be mistaken for McGruber, who in turn should not be mistaken for McGuyver. In each unlikely scenario, McPixel has to find a ticking bomb (or some sort of imminent explosive catastrophe) and defuse it before it goes off, killing vaporizing slightly singeing everyone in the vicinity.

Because it's largely a satirical take on point and click adventure games, and their often pervasive sense of illogical randomness, here's not much more to the game than simply clicking on hotspots in the environment and seeing what happens. Sometimes you'll end up defusing the bomb out of pure luck, sometimes you'll fail but get some kind of idea about what might be the correct combination of hotspots to interact with, but most of the time a complete non-sequitur happens and everyone dies. After each stage, successful or no, the game moves onto the next in a series of six, eventually looping back to the ones you didn't beat over and over until all six scenarios are clear. Once this is accomplished, the player has "saved the day" and can move on to the next sextet.

Here's the Quick Look.

The playthrough: One of the hardest forms of comedy to do right is "randumb", that oft-maligned merging of non-sequitur absurdism and being stupid for stupidity's sake. So many of its practitioners -- The Mighty Boosh, Tim and Eric, anything that considers monkeys and/or bacon and/or goofy hats to be intrinsically hilarious -- simply fall flat because they don't quite realize how this form of comedy is meant to operate. For randumb to truly work, you have to establish some expectations first with a mundane or cliché setting, and then subvert those expectations. Crucially, this must be done with enough speed that the viewer can subconsciously infer the obvious outcome but has not yet consciously deduced that, logically, something unexpected must happen for the humor to emerge. In a sense, you have to get in there and make the joke happen quickly before the viewer can fully figure out what's going on, like some sort of comedy ninja. What's equally important is that you don't just create bizarre scenario after scenario with no basis in reality because that just leaves the viewer in a constant state of confusion, and therefore can't appreciate the actually funny part when it finally occurs. It's why the jokes a movie like Airplane! hit so much harder; it has that bedrock of a very dry, overly dramatic disaster movie premise and some deadpan acting with which to expertly subvert.

Anyway, the purpose of that little rant is so it can lead to discussing what I most admire about McPixel: how adroitly it manages to take advantage of a form of comedy that is so easy to get wrong. In fact, almost every Indie game I've played with this sense of humor has managed to blow it one way or another, and if I end up enjoying those games it's usually in spite of its dumb humor rather than because of it. I'm not going to claim that every joke in McPixel is a winner either (in fact, many are just awkward non-jokes), but there's so many thrown at you in such a short amount of time that it's hardly worth going into the laff-to-gaff ratio. This goes a long way into explaining why I found the Quick Look so amusing as well, as it gave the duo (Ryan and Patrick in this case) a lot of goofiness to work from.

McPixel's not just good for a few chuckles though, as there's also a little bit of method behind the superficially random madness. The way the game reveals hints about each scenario even when you're unsuccessful, such as showing where the bomb is and what effects occur if you try to use certain items on nearby NPCs, can actually lead to some promising results if you follow those implications to their logical conclusion. That said, it's every bit as common to discover the solution via a complete stab in the dark, or that the solution ends up being so simple that you don't even initially think to try it (the amount of puzzles for which all I had to do was click the bomb...). The game also extends its lifespan by tasking players to earn gold ranking on each stage as well; this is done by finding EVERY possible outcome in a stage, most of which still result in an early explodey demise. It's an inspired form of longevity, because finding all the alternate paths is every bit as challenging as trying to ascertain the correct solution, while also being a subtle way for the developer to kindly ask the player to find all the jokes they carefully crafted for them.

The verdict: I've beaten several chapters so far and intend to beat all of it, including the "free DLC", before moving onto the next trio after this blog goes up. I'm hooked. The next lot can wait, trust me.

The Moment of Truth

I want to say McPixel for the hell of it, but I'll probably still be playing Edna and Harvey for a long time after McPixel's done and dusted. What the hell, I'll just underline both for separate reasons. I've never particularly liked the argument that a good game that takes ten hours to beat will always trump an equally fun game that takes five hours to beat. Running time doesn't generally work as a factor when comparing and contrasting because it depends so heavily on the game(s) in question; all you can say with any authority is whether each individual game outstays its welcome or is over far too soon.

Oh, and so she doesn't feel left out, here's a special reward for Angelica Weaver as well: I'm going to reveal the ending.

She's a ghost.

Yeah, fuck you too, game.

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