OK, I’ll be honest: I’ve been putting this one off. I clicked on it three times, but every time I was confronted with that so-wacky opening graphic, and kind of stared at it. Then I saw that the protagonist was another detective, but that the whole thing was going to be wacky monkey cheese antics, and, well… It just took me a while to feel like playing it.
After doing so:
I have no idea why the protagonist needed to be a detective. It could’ve easily just been some random Joe, except for that you get points for finding a jacket and fedora and putting them on, which didn’t need to be in the game anyway. You actually start out the game as someone who works in a deli, which makes me think that really you just work in a deli and wish you were a detective. So if you just started out as “a guy who worked in a deli,” and the detective part wasn’t in the game, you lose nothing. …For that matter, the deli doesn’t really factor in either.
Anyway, the first room in the game has cheese and then later on a different room has cheese and you solve a puzzle using the cheese. But there’s no monkey, so I was only half-right about the monkey cheese. Maybe the deli thing would’ve worked better if you brought the cheese with you from the deli, but you just randomly find it. Also, the Time To Crate on this IF is: two rooms.
Other stuff was sort of amusing, though, in that lol-random sort of way where you have a fart gun and you fuel a space ship with live kittens. The world the game describes makes no sense but definitely doesn’t need to. The way the game is programmed causes some weird issues with item descriptions in a room, such as this bit with the metal tray:
Lab (on the operating table)
You are in a brightly lit medical lab. Rows of strange and unidentifiable medical instruments line the walls, as well as anatomy charts of no creature you’ve ever heard of… except for the human one. Against the back wall is a bunch of Zarconians. An alien Nurse is here, as well as an alien Doctor. They appear to be whispering to each other.An automatic sliding door leads north.
It is a small metal tray. There are no tools on it just now.
You can also see a Nurse, a Doctor and a bunch of Zarconians here.
That is exactly the description that I see when I start out in this room.
Also, I can’t attempt to talk to the doctor or nurse about anything, but if I Listen to them, suddenly the next cut-scene is triggered. When the game first started, I found it kind of annoying that solving puzzles didn’t actually give me any agency, but rather, were just a matter of something to do to trigger the next cut-scene. When I finally started planning my daring escape from the aliens who could kidnap me, then I discovered the character could die, but of course that seems to be part of the point. This doesn’t actually reset anything except your position in the area (even your inventory items remain after death), so it may be said to be a minor setback at most.
For some reason I kind of found it refreshing that hitting and shooting dudes (even if it is with an ice ray or fart gun) had an actual effect in this game instead of the default response. But the end result of the game is I kind of felt like I was trial-and-erroring my way through more than I should have. I didn’t really end up taking advantage of what can be said the game’s core mechanic, which is that you can stretch your eye out to view rooms ahead… because if you do die randomly from not looking ahead, it doesn’t really limit you very much at all. Plus the deaths are probably the most completely written part of the game, so you should at least view one or two. They call to mind the old, elaborate Sierra-style deaths that Larry Laffer would sometimes have to endure.
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