Robert DeFord

It's a good thing that this game takes only about four or five minutes to play. You'll have to play it at least two times before you understand what the game is about. Then, you'll have to play it a few more times before you can get the feeling that you have traversed enough of the game's many paths to feel like you've seen all that you care to see. That's the author's intent, I think. You see, this game lets you control what two very stoned pot heads buy at a small convenience store. They make stoner remarks to each other as they buy things. These remarks fit together to gradually reveal a disjointed picture of their lives away from the store, and that gradual revelation is the story being told, such as it is.

 

In my estimation, you are going to do multiple playthroughs for one of two reasons: 1) You yourself are a stoner and enjoy seeing the pot thoughts of other stoners, or 2) You are not a smoker but have a morbid curiosity about what its like to be stoned. If neither of those two reasons apply to you, you will likely abandon the game after your first playthrough.

 

I found the game's text had a certain droll humor to it, albeit minimal. Consequently, the game was mildly enjoyable for me, and I did three or four playthroughs just to see more of what's there. (You may guess as to which of the two reasons was responsible for my multiple playthroughs.) However, I wasn't interested enough in the 'story' being told by the game to keep playing it enough to see all of it.

 

This is a Twine game that you play in the browser of your choice. There is no command parser, just hyperlinks. Your control over the outcome is limited to clicking on what purchases the men will take to the checkout counter, which is the final scene in the game.

 

This final scene does an abrupt point-of-view shift that I felt was a little disconcerting. You start out in the game as an invisible presence that exercises puppet-master control over the actions of the two protagonists. That point of view suddenly shifts in the last scene where you become a generic check out clerk in the game who just smiles and nods to ring up each item that was selected by the puppet master. That's the limit of your choices, by the way; you get to choose a NOD or a SMILE hyperlink for each item. Both links seem to do the same thing, so there is no real control over what happens. Consequently, the outcome is actually a cutscene that your read in little chunks instead of all at once.