Review #2 - 2023
It's quirky. It's bizarre. It's incomprehensible. It's so unapologetically 90s, an era where the CD-ROM allowed for developers to take advantage of multimedia, and push the medium to its limits with reckless abandon. Videos, music, interactive graphics galore. You could do anything. Literally anything. There were no guidelines to how these things should be made, nor was there very much in the way of quality control. That's how you end up with products like this.
The game has you play as a member of the Smart Patrol (if I gather that correctly). Your job is to... well I actually don't know. You're thrust into this strange Factory Pomo designed world where you have hardly any time to explore it. You visit an area, only to be told you need to get back to your vehicle before the time runs out (I swear you only have 5 minutes to do anything). That's the gameplay really, if you can call it that. In true 90s gaming fashion, you don't have a clue what to do, and it's all down to doing things in a specific, unspecified order so you can progress. It expects you to start the game over, and over, and over again in order to get it right, but any person in their right mind would quit playing the moment it ends.
I'm not any person in their right mind.
I intend on returning to this game, and I intend on figuring this thing out. I'm a sucker for cheese like this. The aesthetic is enough to draw me in, and the scenes I did encounter, had me dying to uncover more. I don't know how involved DEVO was in the making of this game, but regardless, it has their abstract worldview written all over it. I for one, will be back. Everyone else, you'll be better off saving your sanity. Here, watch this guy play it.
It's quirky. It's bizarre. It's incomprehensible. It's so unapologetically 90s, an era where the CD-ROM allowed for developers to take advantage of multimedia, and push the medium to its limits with reckless abandon. Videos, music, interactive graphics galore. You could do anything. Literally anything. There were no guidelines to how these things should be made, nor was there very much in the way of quality control. That's how you end up with products like this.
The game has you play as a member of the Smart Patrol (if I gather that correctly). Your job is to... well I actually don't know. You're thrust into this strange Factory Pomo designed world where you have hardly any time to explore it. You visit an area, only to be told you need to get back to your vehicle before the time runs out (I swear you only have 5 minutes to do anything). That's the gameplay really, if you can call it that. In true 90s gaming fashion, you don't have a clue what to do, and it's all down to doing things in a specific, unspecified order so you can progress. It expects you to start the game over, and over, and over again in order to get it right, but any person in their right mind would quit playing the moment it ends.
I'm not any person in their right mind.
I intend on returning to this game, and I intend on figuring this thing out. I'm a sucker for cheese like this. The aesthetic is enough to draw me in, and the scenes I did encounter, had me dying to uncover more. I don't know how involved DEVO was in the making of this game, but regardless, it has their abstract worldview written all over it. I for one, will be back. Everyone else, you'll be better off saving your sanity. Here, watch this guy play it.