I always thought Panic! was one of the trippy non-games that later became so common on the Playstation, but this feels much more like Nintendo's brand of odd odyssey. My elevator pitch here is, "what if WarioWare was an escape room?" Panic! has the absurdist minimalism and hilarious ambiguity of WarioWare, but through a point and click adventure lens. There is a massive tree of mini-scenes you are stumbling through (I love the pause screen that shows you the map, it gives a sense that there is some deep order behind the madness), and the puzzles swing between nonsense and understated logical brilliance.

It's a wonderful ride of a game, an experience that I think anyone could pickup and play to some extent, so in that way it's one of the more accessible highlights on the Sega CD.

Panic! is an obscure Sega CD game with a "plot" motivated by absolute nonsense and a weird fixation on Easter Island Moai heads a couple decades before the internet got ahold of them as a meme. It is also probably among the most understandably hit or miss and "not for everyone" things I've ever encountered. In the same way I find it one of the most entertaining experiences I've ever had, someone else could just as easily be annoyed and even bored by it.

Panic!'s "gameplay" is quite literally just pushing buttons. You end up in a scenario, you have a choice of buttons to choose from a interface for that scene, you press one, something happens, and if you press the right one you move on the next scenario (of which the connection with the one you just came from is dubious at best). There's different amounts of buttons for each scene ranging from just 2 or 3 for a few, to over a dozen rarely in some cases. Also there are multiple different scenarios that are possible outcomes of progression in some scenes, so there's a sort of tiered branching tree and navigating to the end through the tree with your button presses is the goal. In theory you could maybe get insanely lucky and pick the right button every time and the game would simply be pushing buttons through loosely connected weird settings to the very end with nothing very entertaining at all except the art and opening/closing scenes of the story.

The real "substance" of Panic! comes from pushing the wrong buttons. When you push a button that doesn't result in you progressing onward to another scene, usually some event happens, then you're taken back to the button interface you were just at. So some levels can become a process of elimination (or you push all the wrong buttons intentionally to see what each scenario has to offer). 90% of the "wrong" button events do something with the scenario you're currently in;. Let's use an example of a scene of a group of buttons for some reason hooked up to a T-rex skeleton in a museum; one button can have the skeleton try to eat you, another might make it do a goofy dance, another might have a bigger skeleton chase the T-rex off or the like. Two more rare possibilities exist in specific scenes as well. One of these seems like you're going to progress but instead you cut to a scene where you get some really odd one liner from one of the very bizarre NPCs that inhabit the game's strange world, then back your buttons as before. Another are boobytrapped buttons which are very rare and present in only a fraction of the games total scenarios, that for some reason cause the destruction of a real world monument in the game like the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben or something. I can't fathom why this happens, but it does, so you can either try to avoid them, or collect all acts of terrorism which the handily game tracks for you! Then there are also some choice that progress you sideways or backwards along the tree of scenes and even some sections you can end up in loops. So the fun of the game is actually navigating back and forth through this labyrinth of scenarios with your button presses and seeing what weirdness the game has to offer.

The greatest strength of the game's value as entertainment does not exactly come from this simplistic gameplay loop that can understandably get old or frustrating when not witnessing new events and getting stuck in loops or seeing the same scenes again and again; it comes from exploring the scenes for what they have to offer and taking in the bizarre tone, atmosphere and sense of humor present in the wrong button choices in each scenario. It ranges from basic cartoonish humor, and something not unlike Terry Gilliam's humor found in the animated sections of Monty Python, to things that are downright genuinely surreal and odd. In this way Panic!'s greatest strength is its pure, raw creativity. It can be dumb, it can hit or miss, it can be really weird and downright nonsense, but it makes for an unforgettable experience that, if you can appreciate it, is incredibly creative and ridiculously fun. Genuinely one of my favorite and most entertaining experiences with this entire medium simply for how genuinely creative and strange it is.

Absolutely wild that a game like this could not only get all the go-aheads to become a full retail release, but also manage to get localized for an english market. The fact that it did though is raw as fuck

This is like the least gamey video game to ever game the videos. You basically use a cursor to push a variety of buttons in a variety of different rooms, and that's it. Some buttons take you to a different room, some buttons destroy a world landmark, and most buttons just play a very inconsequential gag. There is zero way to know what button will do what, so push away and hope for the best! There is an in-game map to show how deep in the madness you are, and provided you remember (or write down) which buttons take you where then the game is a cinch. That being said, the core second-to-second gameplay is essentially just russian roulette, and while that sounds horrible on paper, idk the games short and amusing enough to make it work. Most of the fun just comes from seeing what the fuck kind of weird shit is gonna happen, and it's a great game to show to friends just to see how they react.

I assumed that this game served as a tech demo for Data East to understand using the sega CD hardware or something, but apparently this is the only game they made on this system and mobygames lists the director and primary graphics credit as only having worked on this sole game and nothing else so maybe this game is the result of a passion project, who knows. The sheer amount of dumb characters, animations, setpieces, and one-off jokes definitely gave me the impression that they wanted to make something that could only be done with the space of a CD-ROM disc at the time, and by god, they succeeded. Ain't no way in hell you could have fit this on a game cartridge. Honestly give it a try and very quickly you will find out whether or not you'll be into it.

I installed the Sega CD BIOS today and tested it out with this game. Hard to call this much of a "game" necessarily, you just press buttons and goofy things happen. Not too far off from a browser game, or something like the Homestar Runner website, but with a lot more content overall. There really is a surprising amount of stuff to see here, and it can be completed in anywhere from 20 minutes to multiple hours.

I think this is a lot of fun, just doing fuckall and watching nonsense take place, but I can see it not really working for everybody. I really like it because it reminds me of a lot of the things I played when I was very little, like on the old Nick Jr website for example. I must've been 6 or so when they rebranded and changed the website and I remember crying like a bitch about it. They also changed the fries at Wendy's that year, twas a rough time.

was a big fan of pressing a button and blowing up the british pariliament building, peak video game wish fulfillment

basically just a full game version of those old clickamajigs that used to be on nick.com. those are a thing everyone remembers, right? like the one with the demon kids that dont like black licorice and the one where the dude with the chemistry set turns into a girl or w/e. you get the point tho its basically just a series of buttons that make wacky shit happen. usually pretty interesting stuff, like the sound design how most everything is just mouth noises, and theres def enough memorable gags. just gets kinda tedious after a while.

also its very funny just instantly picking the correct button out of like 15 or w/e and instantly teleporting out of a room without doing anything. peak gamer here