The Little Evil, Ugly Guy On My Shoulder's Verdict: This game sucks ass.
The Little Nice, Handsome Guy On My Shoulder's Verdict: This frightening, immersive text adventure is an under-appreciated voyage into the untapped realm of minimalism.
My Verdict: This game sucks ass.
Game Information
Game Type: TADS
Author Info: Your guess is as good as mine.
Other Games By This Author: Maybe Detective
Download Link: Silence of the Lambs
This is the worst game I have ever played in my life. Not just the worst text adventure. Not just the worst video game. The worst game. Even Custer's Revenge for the Atari 2600 was better. You know, that game where you try to move past the arrows so you can rape the Native American girl? That game was extremely offensive both for its racial and its sexual content, but at least it was a game that could be played and enjoyed by the more hard-headed of the species. The same can not be said for this game. While Ben Parrish's text adventure games attempt to annoy and to bother its player, they also succeed in entertaining him/her at the same time. This game, on the other hand, appears to be a deliberate attempt by the author to annoy as many people as play it, but it has no redeeming entertainment or artistic value whatsoever. Imagine, if you will, a one room game with a parser which recognizes about four commands in total. A game which has no discernible plot line - only a bunch of lambs which won't shut up. The only way to win the game is to silence the lambs. And there only appears to be one way of doing that. Can we say: GUESS THE VERB??
This site does not hand out 1s out very often. This, I feel, is not solely due to the reviewers' generous and kindly natures. No, I'd go so far as to say that 99% of all interactive fiction has at least some redeeming quality. Heck, even Detective has some redeeming qualities. Comparatively few games are so bad so as to be offensively bad. But this game is definitely one of those few. Obviously, it was deliberately made as bad as it is - somebody's idea of a "joke", I guess. The joke's on us. Author is laughing his/her ass off right now thinking how many brain cells have been slaughtered with the aid of his/her devious creation. And that's why I'm trashing it. The author didn't even TRY. At least I've gotten a little revenge on 'em now by using this incendiary review to introduce our nifty new pre-review information section. Isn't it cool? There'll be more useful information on games that matter, naturally. The awesome thing about it all is that though Silence of the Lambs is an overrated movie and a terrible text adventure, it was with this review that we added the awesome, unbelievably cool pre-review game information stuff! Yahoo!
Simple Rating: 1/10
Complicated Rating:5/50
Story: 1/10
Writing: 1/10(There's even a typo included in the last message of the game. You don't think Harry Hardjono wrote this game, do you?)
Playability: 1/10
Puzzle Quality: 1/10
Parser Responsiveness: 1/10
Ben sprach the following on November 14th, 1999:
Detective had no redeeming qualities.
Quentin D. Thompson sprach the following on November 14th, 1999:
Going by mentality, I strongly suspect that the guy who wrote this game is the same joker who posted that HERNANDO JOOBA JOOBA thingy on the message board. And HERNANDO JOOBA is a (very) imperfect anagram of Harry Hardjono. *Sigh*. And I thought his worst game was Cask. [Of course, all this is a joke.]
Mark Musante sprach the following on November 23d, 1999:
OK, I have to confess that it was I who had written the game. There's a story behind the creation of the game which I posted to raif or rgif but, unfortunately, DejaNews no longer has the article.
So, thus, I must spend the rest of my days knowing that a little joke implemented just for the fun of it has deeply offended someone.
And, you know, I think I can live with that.
Esrom sprach the following on December 22nd, 1999:
A one-joke game that, sadly, doesn't measure up to the all-time one-joke classic, Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die.
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