- Joined
- Jun 27, 2014
Very rarely, you can come across an oddity when it comes to game development. Here at Jaimas Plays, we've seen everything from activist games that think the purity of the message trumps everything, and that any offense conducted in the name of the ideology is acceptable, games with no actual content whatsoever that the developer thinks are relevant because of their message, games which literally can be remade and exceeded in an afternoon, and more rarely, games which cause me actual psychological harm.
But there is a rare category that I jovially call "Shitpost Games," where the entire point is to condense a game into a long-form shitpost. Most of these tend to be attached to well-known game streamers; some of the best-known Shitpost Games on the internet emerged from Vinesauce's community, for example:
Many of these are filled with community-wide in-jokes, or are just there to have silly fun, but not all of them emerge from a place of reverence. More rarely, you have shitpost games that exist as an attempt to call attention to something or as a criticism of a given community. Today's seminal entry, The Detractor, is one of these, and it's a game that got pulled from Steam less than seven hours after it went up. Indeed, this review would not exist were it not for an especially canny Kiwi who immediately noticed it was for sale and promptly gifted me it with the request I review it.
Well, asked and provided, so here we go.
The Detractor is a game that exists to make fun of DarkSydePhil, one of the perennial shitty streamers on the Internet. Making fun of DSP is nothing new; DasBoSchitt did so years ago with his Youtube Avenue series, and before that, people did so with the This Is How You Don't Play series. DSP has been a target of perpetual scorn since the moment he surfaced because he embodies everything negative about game streamers: Petty, stupid, ignorant, self-important, arrogant, barely knows how to play games, often shows zero capacity for adaptive behavior, and more. But the part that everyone hates the most is by far his incapacity to learn from his previous fuckups and grow as a person, resulting in him being perpetually angry and shitty. Look, go to his fucking threads if you want a better review of Phil himself, he's a legacy lolcow that has been around nearly as long as Chris and will doubtless be around long after the majority of the cows we cover are dead.
The Detractor itself is a game making fun of our boy.
One day, in the kingdom of fuck, the maladapted ruler demands his daily tribute and one of the musclebound speds who apparently represents his audience refuses. Enraged by this, Phil kicks his ass and banishes him from the land.
This sets our burly protagonist on a quest to get back there and punch the king in his stupid face.
You won't be alone, this girl shows up and gives you a pep-talk, but without further ado, let us press into the autistic world of Detractor.
You play as this musclebound dude who must go around beating the shit out of people until he reaches Phil and can punch him in the face. Along the way you must also defeat other musclebound dudes.
If I didn't know about the DSP component, I'd assume this game was made by Vinesauce's Joel, because the Ballad of Bulk Bogan keeps coming to mind.
At its core, this game is a punching game akin to Punch-Out, though in practice Detractor is trying to be different and in the process is trying way too hard to keep its various individual components in the air. The core gameplay loop of the Punch-Out games was that they were essentially rhythm games in the form of a boxing match, training the player to use different tricks against different attacks to avoid them and deliver counter-attacks while each opponent had their own strengths and weaknesses to exploit. Punch-Out relied on very tight controls, very straightforward mechanics, and a whole lot of personality to keep itself rolling forward, and Detractor has almost none of this.
You choose where to aim with the mouse in Detractor. You can only target the face or abdomen unless the target's guard is open, then you can go for chest hits. You can miss by failing to click on the target. Every thrown punch takes stamina, which in this game takes an eternity and a year to fucking recharge. You can block without stamina loss, but the enemies don't telegraph two of the available punch types well which makes it very hard to block those two specific strikes. The enemies also do a ton of damage to you, while your attacks do very little. The gameplay loop often devolves into pounding the shit out of the enemy, waiting for your stamina to recharge, blocking their attacks, and then repeating the procedure, which results in a shocking amount of downtime during fights. win the battle, and you'll get gold and XP.
Gold you spend at the shops (which have this guy as their shopkeeper) for items that can help you. Some of these are extremely expensive - far more than you can reasonably be expected to have, and some have upgrade costs that are even more so. XP eventually levels you up, and you can spend a random number of skill points on stats. These will buff your damage, your stamina bar (nowhere near enough), your max health, or your intellect (which is used to cast spells, which you have to unlock).
The map is randomly designed, and you fight through node after node as yo9u make your way to the north to extract vengeance, punching people as you go. All the while, you hear DSP quotes constantly.
One important node you can find is the campsite node. This will completely heal you and also give sage advice that DSP would never, in a billion years, actually listen to.
One big problem this game has is its RNG. I'm almost entirely certain that it's intentional, probably a slam of some sort at DSP, but the dice in this game are pathologically unable to roll above a three. Ever. What this means is that if you end up on an encounter tile (which is a dice roll), it will be negative for you 100% of the time. You are never getting enough stat points for it to matter, you are never winning the skill rolls on encounter nodes, and you are never going to ever win the proverbial coin-flips.
Because of all of this, it is very easy to die, too, especially because the enemies get way stronger way faster than you and you do not have any way of matching up. When you die, you return to the start, the map is re-randomized, and you lose everything.
So the game is done, right? You can't win this?
Well, not really. See, every time you die, you keep any items, spells, and gold you have. So if you fight through the game long and hard enough, or master the game's combat loop sufficiently, you will, inevitably, defeat the King of Hate himself. Guaranteed. It's just a matter of putting your grind on. The game also autosaves so you don't need to worry, you will make progress, even if it's at 15 minutes at a time and in the stupidest possible fucking way.
At random you can run into Arm Wrestling minigames that allow you to face local champions in MORTAL ARM COMBAT in order to earn gold. You can also find minigames like Flappy Paypig to earn more gold, or training tiles where you hammer the buttons as fast as you can to get free XP. The whole gameplay loop is all about persistence; learn the game's moves, earn treasure, come back and kick Phil's stupid ass.
When you do finally reach the boss, you must defeat lesser incarnations of DSP to clear the level and move onto the real one. This is the big reason for the grind; you need to get past each one in turn, fight past harder opposition, and push deeper in. The further you go, the tougher opposition becomes, so the grind is the only way forward on this game. Later enemies may have special abilities or armor you will also need to deal with, and so, there is even more reason for you to try, try again, because Phil ain't gonna punch himself. I haven't beaten the first one yet, the game won't give me a good map layout and I keep running into shitheads with armor or who keep using the low punch that's hard to block because of the fast windup.
How much this game is going to be for you will depend on your personal capacity for listening to DSP quotes, your patience, and your willingness to punch things. At its core, it's a fun little stupid time-waster that is trying to teach a valuable lesson under what seems to be really questionable game design, and I won't be surprised if people actually wind up enjoying it a great deal, but if you are hoping for a gameplay experience akin to Punch-Out's, I encourage you to keep walking, because there is little for you here.
The presentation is good, and if DSP didn't get the thing napalmed off Steam, I could see this being a pretty popular little derp title. Unfortunately, he did, and now there's no way to play it. Sure would be a problem if people realized that the game was programmed in Unity and could be run completely offline without consequence and has no DRM, but I'm not the one in charge of such things.
And on that thought, I leave you. I will be playing more of it when time allows (this week has been miserable), and will give you guys more as I come upon it.
But there is a rare category that I jovially call "Shitpost Games," where the entire point is to condense a game into a long-form shitpost. Most of these tend to be attached to well-known game streamers; some of the best-known Shitpost Games on the internet emerged from Vinesauce's community, for example:
Many of these are filled with community-wide in-jokes, or are just there to have silly fun, but not all of them emerge from a place of reverence. More rarely, you have shitpost games that exist as an attempt to call attention to something or as a criticism of a given community. Today's seminal entry, The Detractor, is one of these, and it's a game that got pulled from Steam less than seven hours after it went up. Indeed, this review would not exist were it not for an especially canny Kiwi who immediately noticed it was for sale and promptly gifted me it with the request I review it.
Well, asked and provided, so here we go.
The Detractor is a game that exists to make fun of DarkSydePhil, one of the perennial shitty streamers on the Internet. Making fun of DSP is nothing new; DasBoSchitt did so years ago with his Youtube Avenue series, and before that, people did so with the This Is How You Don't Play series. DSP has been a target of perpetual scorn since the moment he surfaced because he embodies everything negative about game streamers: Petty, stupid, ignorant, self-important, arrogant, barely knows how to play games, often shows zero capacity for adaptive behavior, and more. But the part that everyone hates the most is by far his incapacity to learn from his previous fuckups and grow as a person, resulting in him being perpetually angry and shitty. Look, go to his fucking threads if you want a better review of Phil himself, he's a legacy lolcow that has been around nearly as long as Chris and will doubtless be around long after the majority of the cows we cover are dead.
The Detractor itself is a game making fun of our boy.
One day, in the kingdom of fuck, the maladapted ruler demands his daily tribute and one of the musclebound speds who apparently represents his audience refuses. Enraged by this, Phil kicks his ass and banishes him from the land.
This sets our burly protagonist on a quest to get back there and punch the king in his stupid face.
You won't be alone, this girl shows up and gives you a pep-talk, but without further ado, let us press into the autistic world of Detractor.
You play as this musclebound dude who must go around beating the shit out of people until he reaches Phil and can punch him in the face. Along the way you must also defeat other musclebound dudes.
If I didn't know about the DSP component, I'd assume this game was made by Vinesauce's Joel, because the Ballad of Bulk Bogan keeps coming to mind.
At its core, this game is a punching game akin to Punch-Out, though in practice Detractor is trying to be different and in the process is trying way too hard to keep its various individual components in the air. The core gameplay loop of the Punch-Out games was that they were essentially rhythm games in the form of a boxing match, training the player to use different tricks against different attacks to avoid them and deliver counter-attacks while each opponent had their own strengths and weaknesses to exploit. Punch-Out relied on very tight controls, very straightforward mechanics, and a whole lot of personality to keep itself rolling forward, and Detractor has almost none of this.
You choose where to aim with the mouse in Detractor. You can only target the face or abdomen unless the target's guard is open, then you can go for chest hits. You can miss by failing to click on the target. Every thrown punch takes stamina, which in this game takes an eternity and a year to fucking recharge. You can block without stamina loss, but the enemies don't telegraph two of the available punch types well which makes it very hard to block those two specific strikes. The enemies also do a ton of damage to you, while your attacks do very little. The gameplay loop often devolves into pounding the shit out of the enemy, waiting for your stamina to recharge, blocking their attacks, and then repeating the procedure, which results in a shocking amount of downtime during fights. win the battle, and you'll get gold and XP.
Gold you spend at the shops (which have this guy as their shopkeeper) for items that can help you. Some of these are extremely expensive - far more than you can reasonably be expected to have, and some have upgrade costs that are even more so. XP eventually levels you up, and you can spend a random number of skill points on stats. These will buff your damage, your stamina bar (nowhere near enough), your max health, or your intellect (which is used to cast spells, which you have to unlock).
The map is randomly designed, and you fight through node after node as yo9u make your way to the north to extract vengeance, punching people as you go. All the while, you hear DSP quotes constantly.
One important node you can find is the campsite node. This will completely heal you and also give sage advice that DSP would never, in a billion years, actually listen to.
One big problem this game has is its RNG. I'm almost entirely certain that it's intentional, probably a slam of some sort at DSP, but the dice in this game are pathologically unable to roll above a three. Ever. What this means is that if you end up on an encounter tile (which is a dice roll), it will be negative for you 100% of the time. You are never getting enough stat points for it to matter, you are never winning the skill rolls on encounter nodes, and you are never going to ever win the proverbial coin-flips.
Because of all of this, it is very easy to die, too, especially because the enemies get way stronger way faster than you and you do not have any way of matching up. When you die, you return to the start, the map is re-randomized, and you lose everything.
So the game is done, right? You can't win this?
Well, not really. See, every time you die, you keep any items, spells, and gold you have. So if you fight through the game long and hard enough, or master the game's combat loop sufficiently, you will, inevitably, defeat the King of Hate himself. Guaranteed. It's just a matter of putting your grind on. The game also autosaves so you don't need to worry, you will make progress, even if it's at 15 minutes at a time and in the stupidest possible fucking way.
At random you can run into Arm Wrestling minigames that allow you to face local champions in MORTAL ARM COMBAT in order to earn gold. You can also find minigames like Flappy Paypig to earn more gold, or training tiles where you hammer the buttons as fast as you can to get free XP. The whole gameplay loop is all about persistence; learn the game's moves, earn treasure, come back and kick Phil's stupid ass.
When you do finally reach the boss, you must defeat lesser incarnations of DSP to clear the level and move onto the real one. This is the big reason for the grind; you need to get past each one in turn, fight past harder opposition, and push deeper in. The further you go, the tougher opposition becomes, so the grind is the only way forward on this game. Later enemies may have special abilities or armor you will also need to deal with, and so, there is even more reason for you to try, try again, because Phil ain't gonna punch himself. I haven't beaten the first one yet, the game won't give me a good map layout and I keep running into shitheads with armor or who keep using the low punch that's hard to block because of the fast windup.
How much this game is going to be for you will depend on your personal capacity for listening to DSP quotes, your patience, and your willingness to punch things. At its core, it's a fun little stupid time-waster that is trying to teach a valuable lesson under what seems to be really questionable game design, and I won't be surprised if people actually wind up enjoying it a great deal, but if you are hoping for a gameplay experience akin to Punch-Out's, I encourage you to keep walking, because there is little for you here.
The presentation is good, and if DSP didn't get the thing napalmed off Steam, I could see this being a pretty popular little derp title. Unfortunately, he did, and now there's no way to play it. Sure would be a problem if people realized that the game was programmed in Unity and could be run completely offline without consequence and has no DRM, but I'm not the one in charge of such things.
And on that thought, I leave you. I will be playing more of it when time allows (this week has been miserable), and will give you guys more as I come upon it.
