Glitchspankr

Scene: you’re a human playing a video game. However, the video game immediately glitches and puts you into a world where you have to find and attack “the glitch”. Armed with a hand on a stick, you navigate through small 3d levels packed with ordinary objects and whack everything in sight (click-and-hold mechanics just waggle the stick in front of you). Eventually, you’ll whack an item that the glitch is hiding inside and you’ll get to progress. That is the “main” gameplay loop.

But why are you spanking the glitch? What is wrong with this program? Keep playing to find out.

Enterprising players will pretty quickly locate hints that there is more to this game than appears, and this leads to the “secondary” gameplay loop of finding the secrets in each level.

Throughout, regardless of whether you find any secrets, you’re drip fed clues, hints, and various plot progressions that eventually culminate in you understanding what’s going on, Doing The Thing™, and experiencing the bittersweet ending.

It *can* work, and it might work for you, but it just didn’t grab me. It doesn’t help that the main character (other than yourself) is a fetid, stained toilet. He’s amazingly well voice acted (did I mention? The game is fully voice acted — so that’s a plus), but his character is better suited to a comedic side character, not the focal point of the whole game. If you’re easily amused by juvenile, socially awkward toilet humor (which, frankly, I usually am), you might like this game. But for my part, it just didn’t strike the right chord.

Also unhelpful: there are several minigames throughout the game that are all weirdly difficult — especially considering the main gameplay loop of “click to win.” And it’s not a good, satisfying difficulty. It’s “my weapon isn’t aimed at the middle of the screen, so I have to imagine a line arcing from the tip of the weapon down to the bottom left corner of the screen and then extrapolate from the distance of the target where the shot will actually land” style of difficult. If they were not high pressure minigames that you had to win to proceed, I’d be fine with it. But they are high pressure minigames that you have to win to progress, so to me they were just frustrating roadblocks.

One side mechanic is a hub world within the game with tchotchkes that you unlock by amassing points in the spoke levels. I didn’t enjoy the game enough to see everything there is to see in this hub world, but it seems like there are some deeper secrets hidden that even more enterprising players can unlock.

This game will live or die on how entertained you are by the little interactions you have with the fetid toilet. If you think you might enjoy humor that emits from such a character, give it a shot! You’ll almost certainly have a good idea of how well the game works for you within the 2 hour Steam return window.