Summary
Animal is a decent point-and-click game
The Good
I love it! What good is a game you can play through without having to consult the walkthrough in every single scene? Not a single one of the puzzles
makes any sense. I gnawed my arms off while playing this
coprophilic art display.
This product was not meant to be played by ordinary people. It was designed with a stereotype of a
True Gamer in mind; the kind that doesn't exist in real life. This mythical person can solve puzzles of the most
perverse twisted logic and stands proudly with a smile on his face while the developers throw brown disgusting things at him.
Little did I know of the intricacies of
quality adventure gaming. A pen-thin sausage cannot enter the mens lavatory if a handful of dancing cookies are clearly blocking the way, standing some 30 meters from the door. Walking past them and entering the lavatory is
a physical impossibility - I often have a tough time taking a crap if my neighbour has blocked the way by parking his car on the other side of the road. Instead, any sensible rational player would set off the sprinklers and dissolve the cookies to "clear the way".
The game begins (Every single time) with a
wonderfully long intro (Don't worry, it's impossible to skip). The town of
Snackopolis (Argh) is soon electing their new mayor (Politics! Kids will be jumping on the walls!), as the favourite candidate, Dr. Pepereinstein (A giant lightbulb in a lab coat) is kidnapped (Who could have guessed?). It is up to Peperami to save him - but who would save the player? The intro is sheer horror and the voice actor of Peperami does his best to make players want to stab themselves to the heart with peperami sticks instead of completing the game.
The endlessly long fade in and out effects between
every screen didn't get on my nerve at all. I could not make sense of half of the dialogue. All the important information is thoughtfully left out from the optional captioning.
Animal is so accurately traumatizing in every imaginable way, that I'm going to start using it as a standard SI-measure for rating other games, in terms of how many times better other games are compared to it. Not only manages it to rape the product brand of Peperami completely, but it made me lost my appetite after two days of staring at badly rendered
mushrooms with testicles and cookies with Down's syndrome.
The user interface logic is enviable. The reason why Lucasarts adventure games went downhill and got suspended was they never came up with anything as
genius as this: by holding the second mouse button down for a second, an action menu pops up, while the mouse cursor disappears. By waving the mouse in a random direction
violently it might accidentally be possible to select the action you were after. Fortunately there aren't any keyboard shortcuts for the actions, and I am glad the inventory can only be used in the same manner as the actions (lottery from hell).
I have always loved adventure games in which half of the time it's mandatory to select "use the doorway" and half of the time just click and walk through it. To exit from the upper right corner of the screen, it is reasonable to assume the action is performed by
mind-numbingly hunting down a hidden exit-icon on the other side of the screen.
After clearing several locations (In which the only possible action is to walk across the screen), collecting dozens of items in the inventory (Mandatory in completing the game, but cannot be used anywhere), and clearing the most logical puzzles a lottery machine could come up with (A sleeping biscuit cannot be woken up by shouting, kicking or stabbing it. An specific inflated red balloon popped in its mouth with just the right kitchen knife does the job
so much better), the screen flickers in an epileptic way, DOS4GW boots up... and a DOOM-like engine boots up, but
so much better!
The 3D sequence consists of rambling through a still water "sewer" with blue, red and green key coded doors. The sewer is full of angry carrots, potatoes and mushrooms. You are supposed to kill them with a whisk and two guns shooting round balls moving so slowly you can literally walk past them. Enemies flicker, disappear, get stuck in the walls and bounce around in an erratic pattern. Can't find such elegance in modern FPS games.
The biggest challenge is finding your way through the
most massive and confusing level ever. The corridors go on for so long that
new astronomical units are needed for measuring their length and the mushy dark brown textures help tremendously in navigating the identical looking junctions. Again, a lesson for contemporary video game companies on how to make games challenging enough for demanding consumers. Enabling automapping helps even senior citizens to grasp the
fast paced action of this game, as screen refreshing slows down to a halt.
It took me 2 days of making intense love to the game to get through this thrilling action sequence, and after that just about two screens of walking to get
thrown back into another 3D sequence.
My mission was to kill a karate carrot responsible for kidnapping Pepereinstein (for no reason). The game experience is crowned with an ending animation of the quality of a Soviet preservative. Insulting doesn't end there; player is suddenly thrown into the DOS prompt and left all alone in the dark, staring at:
"Go on be an animal and play the game again"
The Bad
Last time I checked, the game still exists.
The Bottom Line
The result of a very successful advertisement campaign: the product disappeared from stores in an instant.
