One of the things that I’ve learnt is that adventure games tend to not be my cup of tea. I’m not QUITE as harsh on them as, say, Yahtzee is, but I will freely admit that adventure games tend to leave me scratching my head about why people get the appeal behind them due to a few of the common threads about them being unimpressive to me. For starters, the ridiculously specific nature of some puzzles can easily grate on me because the solution runs on logic that often makes little-to-no sense when you think about it and the fact that the vast majority of adventure games often fall back onto the “only one solution to every problem” method of thinking (even if the solution is something as ridiculous as putting a carrot in a peephole to grab a ring and avoiding getting killed by having your eye burnt out by a laser you weren’t even told was behind the peephole) means that I tend to lose interest in them.
Still, I will admit that I can see the appeal behind it if you like this kind of thing, so I decided to give The Secret of Tremendous Corporation a shot. And, well...it didn’t change my mind on adventure games, although I won’t deny that it is a decent enough adventure game in its own right to warrant a playthrough if you like that kind of thing, which is all the more impressive when you realise the game was made in about 48 hours for a competition.
First of all, let me get the obvious comment out of the way: yes, the art style of the game is ridiculously simple. It goes for a hand drawn look that is somewhat reminiscent of what you see if you draw the whole game in pencil. While this probably isn’t going to be an automatic turn off if you like old fashioned graphics, it is worth noting that the art style is not going to wow anyone who has played any video game before now. Certainly, this is the part of the game I would have personally suggested the developers redo for the Steam release of the game, as the hand drawn style may make the game a hard sell for those who expect graphics more complex than your average scribbles on a sheet of paper. That said, it does make the game look distinctive (I’ve not seen a lot of games which use this sort of style even for cutscenes, let alone for the whole game), so make of that what you will.
I also will say that the puzzles do sometimes seem to be there to make a problem that needs to be solved which isn’t really necessary to do and which have solutions which don’t really make a lot of sense. The two main puzzles which spring out in this regard are fetching a newspaper from a shelf too high up to reach (why you would store a newspaper on a shelf that most people can’t reach is beyond me, but maybe it contains a fully completed crossword that the paper’s purchaser didn’t want someone to find before they submitted it off for a cash reward or something) which requires you to tie a book to a rope and cover it in chewing gum (because that’s totally not going to ruin the newspaper at all…) and opening a door by scraping a potato down into being a lockpick (I would point out why that doesn’t make sense, but you guys almost certainly are ahead of me on that one). I also find it a bit weird that the solution to a problem involves asking the receptionist for a code when, by all rights, she should not even know about the thing which requires the code in the first place, but I’m arguably nitpicking here.
I also will say that the puzzles do sometimes seem to be there to make a problem that needs to be solved which isn’t really necessary to do and which have solutions which don’t really make a lot of sense. The two main puzzles which spring out in this regard are fetching a newspaper from a shelf too high up to reach (why you would store a newspaper on a shelf that most people can’t reach is beyond me, but maybe it contains a fully completed crossword that the paper’s purchaser didn’t want someone to find before they submitted it off for a cash reward or something) which requires you to tie a book to a rope and cover it in chewing gum (because that’s totally not going to ruin the newspaper at all…) and opening a door by scraping a potato down into being a lockpick (I would point out why that doesn’t make sense, but you guys almost certainly are ahead of me on that one). I also find it a bit weird that the solution to a problem involves asking the receptionist for a code when, by all rights, she should not even know about the thing which requires the code in the first place, but I’m arguably nitpicking here.
The plot of the visual game is MAYBE a tad out there at points (a video game company able to make at least 10,000 games in a year is a bit hard to believe, even with the explanation offered by the game in the plot, and I find the idea of a secret company using a newspaper to place an advert for recruitment kind of ridiculous because it means that everyone who reads that paper will be able to spot the ad...potentially including people who are part of the same companies you are trying to bring down!), but, overall, there’s not a lot really wrong with the story. I think a few rewrites of the story to clear some of the more obvious plot holes would have helped improve the game a bit, but the core of the story, while cliche as all hell, is not bad. It isn’t going to win any awards for strong writing, but I at least found it fun, despite rolling my eyes like they were following the inside of a washing machine more times than I care to admit.
I suppose, if I put myself into the mindset of a old school adventure game fan, this is at least somewhat fun for a single playthrough. It’s lacking a bit of polish and it isn’t going to appeal to those who aren’t already fans of adventure games, but there’s nothing particularly wrong with it if you’re already a fan of this sort of game. It’s not personally for me, but, if you fancy giving it a shot and don’t mind a few logic issues, then there’s certainly far worse games out there.
