Buy Potato Thriller: Steamed Potato Edition

A beautiful masterpiece

Press F to pay respects

Starts PT.
Gets jumpscared by Potato Man.
Runs and hides on bed.

10/10 would spook again

Pure meme beauty. I was dying the entire time from the fact that the concept is the mot amazing of all time. I enjoyed it very much 10/10 would potato again

For full disclosure, I was given a free copy of the game for review purposes.

I'd like to provide an honest, unbiased review, but after having played it for as long as I have, I really don't feel as though I owe this game any more of my time. Still, it definitely needs to be talked about. There's a very clear and unironically ironic positive response to a game that unironically uses irony as its main draw. And, while in it's own twistedly postmodern way this may be a labor of love, it's not a labor of love that's worth even $3.

There's a lot here that makes me believe that the developer was intentionally and ironically making a poor effort to communicate to the player that the game is a joke, wholesale. It's fairly obvious from the response the game has gotten so far, on top of the overall tone of the game. It's not the work of a self-deluding "developer"--the kind of guy who pitches and re-pitches bland asset-pack games on greenlight in the hopes that he can drum up enough support to try and make an extra buck. It's a consequence of a fairly recently spawned ironic meme-y game genre, and I can't say I'm thrilled about it.

But, there's also the other side of this. There's parts I did like, and did find amusing. The first portion of the game is a quite obvious reference to P.T., and the requisite boredom of that section itself if a funny criticism. The author of THIS game, however, has a fraction of the technical skill that the Kojima team did, because half of the triggerable events I came into contact with either worked MOST (not all) of the time, or weren't, in any way, intuitive objects or places to try and activate in the first place. So, while the game itself does have some fairly clever ideas: the game's called Potato Thriller--the beginning of the main game takes place in one long, purgatory of a hallway, with the characteristic non-euclidian geometry that gives us the willies--and there's a handful of slight nods and references to other properties (the game menu is another example, and is a dead ringer for FNAF).

I'm not sure if there's a disconnect between the irony of the game's visual aspect--every piece of rendered material either seems to be bought or repurposed from a graphic pack, or has such a loosely mapped texture it's like my computer is rendering a painted tube sock full of ball bearings--or it's something else that's the problem. I genuinely want to understand how I can give the game a serious criticism without it being immediately deflected by the irony that the game seems to want to hide behind. I can say that with the right tone--this intentional badness has some redeemability. The unfortunate thing about Potato Thriller is that it mixes two very different approaches to criticism and humor, and it ends up muddling them both.

I guess, at the heart, it's not the intentional badness of the game that bothers me, or that so many other people are ironically praising a game that is itself more shrouded in irony than substantiated by anything else: it's the fact that the tone of this irony, the joke inherently acting as the heart of the game is itself broken. Moments of real humor are irregular, and the inconsistency of it actually makes me think that the developer is instead playing at being a person with a highly-refined sense of irony, instead of giving it to us. What we get as a substitute seems like a somewhat generic sequence of parts that all these games have.

On top of that, from a sheer gameplay perspective, there's very little here that I found interesting, or even redeemable. I spent what felt like the better part of two hours wandering up and down the same hallway trying to trigger some even to make progress. I'm not actually sure if there IS another part of the game, or if other reviewers are just taking the ♥♥♥♥ out of everyone else who had trouble with it.

tl;dr Get some other game hyper-saturated in irony, like Sonic Dreams Collection. It's at least made better.