I played it up to a point. The point where my will to live had slipped from me and a coma was beckoning. That sort of point.
Ok, so I said the content theft is the least of its problems and that's not strictly true because the game is very much the sum of its parts.
It opens with a scene of you plummeting into hell. I can't work out if it's from Spore or Painkiller as I've not watched/played either in a long time now, but y'know - it's nicked. Once you're into the game proper, it takes seconds to realise you're a poser model in a screengrab. As is customary, you begin in a cell. Because that's where all games start isn't it?
Cue a goblin walking along the ceiling towards you as your back is turned. Closely followed by an epic unskippable piece of exposition leading to the goblin waving his finger at the lock to unlock it. The scene is set, you're in limbo, in a cell with a no longer locked door. What's your next move? That's right, kids. Go to the door.
So you toddle out the door, your odd shadow and black outline in tow and into the first of a series of corridor rooms. Each corridor room looks entirely different to the last. You come across a few signs en route where you're welcome to endure the tedium of reading each one. Every one of your characters actions is accompanied by a little animation just to drag things out a few seconds longer than they should take.
After meandering around these corridors for what felt like an eternity I finally set upon a room with two exits (although getting out the room into one of the exits was an almighty fuckaround). One way takes you to the kitchen, where you stumble into Vera Duckworth's goblin twin. She's a cook with a taste for human flesh. You know this because there's a whopping amount of tedious dialogue with terrible voice acting to wade through as you suffer each one of the awful jokes the game lays out in front of you. It also turns out you're the captain of the Mary Celeste. Bonus!
Once you've wandered off, took a bath, had a really long poo and sat back down at the keyboard you might just be back into the game itself. If you're slow. I stumbled off into a library (it had books, books and more books) where I got treated to sniffing a pot (not some pot, that would have at least been enjoyable) and into a room with a lever. Attempt to move the lever and your character appears to be making a sound like he's just cum. Bored with that, I went off to investigate the other exit I'd missed.
There's a fat bloke in the centre of the room, he's your jailer and he's in the land of nod. Evidently a heavy sleeper as you conduct an entire conversation in this room with what looks like a reject from the Pirates Of The Caribbean poser model collective about how you should be really quiet so as not to wake the jailer. This goes on for ages and ages and ages.
I couldn't take anymore at this point, I just couldn't. The tedium of wonky controls, exposition central whenever you looked at anything or stumbled upon a character, the way every single room looked like it was in a different building from the last, the awkwardness of moving around the map or looking at *anything* had my dying from the inside.
It's a truly rotten experience that I've likely made sound a gazillion times more interesting and better than it actually is. In fact, the only thing it does have going for it as a game is the "spot the stolen content" meta game. The rest of it will leave you longing for death to come and sweep you away from a world of shit and pain.
Yet, I'm still in awe of the sheer cheek of the whole thing. There's a monumental amount of effort gone into making the game, but no amount of effort is going to make up for the severe lack of talent shown in every facet of the game.
Top marks for balls out cheek, no marks for anything else.
Player
