Dude, Where Is My Beer?

:steamthumbsup:

I love point and clicks, and saw this game a while ago and was on the fence about whether or not I should play it. The art style looked cool but the concept seemed pretty shallow, like the kind of game that think's it's really funny but is actually painfully unfunny. Anyways, when I saw Dude, Where Is My Beer? I decided to add it to my wishlist and it just sat there. Eventually it was on a heavy sale, and I was looking for new point and clicks, so I gave it a try. Unfortunately, my initial judgement was spot on, Dude, Where Is My Beer? is sadly one of the worst point and clicks, if not the worst I've ever played. I can tolerate the bad, painfully repetitive humor to some extent, but the actual game itself is so undercooked it's not even half-baked, it hasn't even been mixed together to form a cohesive dough. The puzzles are problematic for 2 reasons: 1. Probably the biggest issue with this game, the game gives you almost no indication as to what you're even supposed to be doing. Right off the back, the character says he wants a Pilsner, so I put 2 + 2 together, and went to the bar right near the start, ok. You go to the counter and ask for a beer, but guess what? no Pilsner. Ok, let's look at another bar. No pilsner there either. In fact, no bar has Pilsner. Ok I get it, you're trying to find something that is intentionally difficult to find, great. That's all the direction the game gives you. You will fiddle around with random items and interactions, some of which you won't be able to do anything about until random points where the game decides you can now interact with certain things, and you will get no meaningful feedback from almost anything you do in this game. The problem is that even if a solution to a puzzle makes sense in theory, if the game isn't even telling you what your character's objective is, sure, I can aimlessly wonder the map and try random things that make sense, but why would I choose a specific solution if I had nothing whatsoever to point me in the direction of why I would want to do said thing? Worse, many of the logical things you will think to do, don't work and give you no real reason for why they do not work, so even if a puzzle has a somewhat coherent solution, you would never think to do that specific thing, when 90% of the logical things I have already tried, have not worked for illogical reasoning. I mentioned this earlier, but the game has random, unprompted queues which now make a singular thing change somewhere on the map, where you can now achieve one new solution. This doesn't seem that bad on paper, but the game gives you no indication that anything has changed whatsoever, so you have to just randomly check everything constantly to see if hopefully, your new progress, has, for some entirely unrelated and unexplained reason, caused something to update somewhere. Once or twice in a point and click after a major story update, these kind of things are ok; the problem, however, is that this happens constantly, and progressing with puzzles gives you absolutely no story updates. In summary, this game is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of random puzzles with no direction, which leads me to my second point. 2. More than half of all of the puzzle solutions in this game do not follow any coherent stream of logic. How can you expect someone to find a solution to a puzzle, if the solution makes no sense? Brute force? Unfortunately for me, I wasted way too much of my time brute forcing illogical puzzle solutions in this disaster of a game. What's worse, is Dude, Where Is My Beer? teases logical puzzle solutions which are actually red herrings and go nowhere constantly, and instead, has what could be logical puzzle solutions have incredibly convoluted solutions which make no sense. What's worse is the game constantly breaks the fourth wall and tries to reference other point and clicks who have, for the sake of humor, had deliberately dumb puzzle solutions, such as Monkey Island, and although the famous "rubber chicken pully puzzle" is dumb, it is silly dumb and makes sense with context clues, character dialogue, and smart art design. Dude, Where Is My Beer? has none of these things, hell, it barely even has a story, so to say it dropped the ball with it's context clues for its puzzles in an understatement. So what you get is a total lack of story given to the player, zero direction or in game feedback from your actions, illogical and obtuse puzzle solutions, which you have to do in an arbitrary order when the game decides to randomly update random things on the map with no warning. Dude, Where Is My Beer? is an absolute mess of a game, that I cannot recommend to literally anyone. I wouldn't even ask the creators' parents to play this game. Meanwhile, you get this constant stream of poorly written dialogue which is attempting to be witty, but is at best, sensible chuckle material at the beginning and becomes nails on a chalkboard by the end of this mess I hesitantly call a game. To the devs, you couldn't even correctly stick the joke with your half-assed reference to Dude, Where's My Car?, it's "Where's" not "Where Is", what are you even doing with this mess. Absolute trash. 1/10