Bob’s Game Demo Impressions

Bob made a demo for his game. I played it. You shouldn’t.

The first thing you should probably be aware of is that I could only get the demo working on the emulator he links to on his site. No R4 and no DSemu. This emulator, whilst competent, does have an annoying feature to watch out for. Hitting “Esc” closes the emulator without prompt and without saving any settings or data.

The game starts 5 years ago with you (or should that be Yuu!? HAHAKILLME) in your room on “moving day”. There are boxes with stuff in everywhere. Elsewhere in the house is you’re angst ridden, video-game playing brother, kitchen dwelling fussy Mom and “Ping” playing Dad.

Most of the gameplay can be worked out from either of the videos currently linked to on the Bob’s Game homepage. It’s simple enough; you move around the world from an angled, top down view (think Pokemon… or basically every other third-person DS/GBA game) with the d-pad and interact with items and people with the A button. You can also move by clicking on the zoomed out lower screen.

Perhaps it’s because the game isn’t finished, or perhaps it’s because this is just a demo, but there was no usable inventory and the assumed stats simply display as question marks across the top of the screen.

The game itself takes the form of a classic adventure game. Your Mom wants batteries, they might be in a box. Go look in every box. They aren’t there. Your brother has them. He is busy playing games so you have to find a way to stop him etc. On the first play through I found this to be simply frustrating trial and error for the most part. There is some logic, but it remains convoluted and boring. The second play through took just a few minutes and didn’t really help the feeling that I had wasted my time.

The game presents itself nicely and is clearly Bob’s biggest talent. The music is simple yet fitting and the graphics, if a little too much like Habbo Hotel for my liking, do their job well. Tall objects like trees and walls block needlessly large areas of the map however, sometimes obscuring routes which is bothersome to say the least.

The scale of the game is something not really measurable by the demo (it is a demo after all). From what Bob’s said and shown, the game is big and has a large number of characters and pieces of dialogue. Hopefully (but unlikely) the full game moves away from the cliché driven, almost trying too hard humour the demo has.

Also, the way all NPCs say “Yuu” instead of you is really fucking annoying. There is an explanation for this but when you find out what that is, it’s still really fucking annoying.

The other massive annoyance with the demo is the GameBoy GameToy and it’s mini-game of Tetris Tetrix. In the demo you meet a second NPC who has a GameToy and you have to show him you’re good at Tetrix by beating it. Something which is really, unbelievably frustrating. I have played Tetris clones before and right now I don’t want to play one. However, if you lose (as in, don’t get to the very end of the game), it just starts again and there is no way to exit. I ran out of patience and stopped playing after several attempts. Fucking obnoxious to be quite honest. If you must know I got to level 12.

I consider myself a fairly decent Tetris player and this was bordering on moderate difficulty. The very notion you have to get past this bit I assume is to stop “novice” gamers progressing is irritating. I probably could “beat” it but I really can’t be arsed.

In the name of frustration I actually went to the Bob’s Game Forum and found that you purposefully can’t actually quit the game, and it is intentionally very hard to beat. Apparently if you do manage to beat it, you are treated to a cut scene of Bob “scheming about his game.” So it’s a game about Bob making his game. How very meta.

This ending, combined with the “jokes” and the “hype” leading up to the game just paints a picture of unavoidable cocky smugness. The game is smug it told a joke, it’s smug you spent ages looking around in boxes for crap, it’s smug it made you play a Tetris clone until you quit and it’s smug that you probably don’t like it.