EGD: This Is Why We Stick To Zombies

Review by meowmeowfurrycat on Friday, August 21st 2015

A confession: I only got two-thirds of the way through this game, but I think I've seen enough.

A digression: I was going to title this review "This Game Was a Lethal Mistake" but (1) bad puns and wordplay in reviews are limited to reviews from 2012 or reviews by demonxz95, and (2) "lethal" mistakes should kill you. I don't know if this is accurate because I didn't finish the game (see: a confession).

My impression:

Lethal Mistakes is the work of a user who has not yet realized his full potential. That's the nice way of putting it.

Sploder is amazing, but out of necessity it has limitations. The platformer creator, for example, lacks many things, one of which is the ability to create a realistic game. Enter Lethal Mistakes, an RPG that attempts to be serious and lifelike, but comes off as ridiculous. The main plot point -- the one that changes the protagonist's life forever -- is simply not feasible. Here's what I mean.

You play as a nerd who collects comic books (what is this, 1985?) and is consistently bullied. One night you leave town by jumping off a cliff and run into the bully. He starts to attack you, but since you're buffer, stronger, and faster than he is, you are able to pull out a sword -- a freaking SWORD -- and KILL him. See what I mean?

Even when we forget about the part of human nature which dictates that if someone is hitting you with a sword you should probably run away, that the bully is so much weaker than you (a nerd) seems ridiculous. If you could kill him in five seconds, why wait?

After this, Lethal Mistakes attempts to be serious, I think. You run away to the mountains and start seeing dead bodies everywhere. This would probably be more effective if said corpses didn't look so comically cartoonish and didn't make me laugh out loud. Then you realize that you have to run away (again) so you walk through a door and enter it and you're in a forest, which is inhabited by green-skinned primitive people and peppered with lava. LAVA. In a FOREST. Yeah, let's just blow off the laws of the natural world, because why not?

So some guy rescues you and takes you to his tree house. If this isn't enough to make you scream PED0PHILE ALERT, then clearly. . . you haven't been watching enough p o r n. You go through the tree house but it's infested with monsters(?) so you find a safe place to hide by jumping into a rocket ship, which explodes. You wake up in an asylum where someone tells you that you've been setting the forest on fire and screaming Satanic stuff. This is where I lost it. Epicosaurus played the Satan card. Why the flying f**k would you introduce SATAN into a game that's (maybe) supposed to be MEANINGFUL? It's a freaking deus ex machina except it does nothing to advance the plot, it just hinders it.

Thank God that at the same moment I became thoroughly sick of the plot I also lost the game, sort of. I haven't talked about the gameplay yet, but there's not much to say. It's okay, I guess. I appreciate that there isn't a lot of switch hunting or impossible parkour, but I despise the huge number of traps (intentional or otherwise) which serve to end the game immediately. The scenery is a lot more chaotic than it should've been; vast swaths of Lethal Mistakes are covered with a tile count equal to the amount of unique tiles used, which looks less cool than lazy. The grass in the forest level is in a strange diagonal pattern. Again, this might've worked in theory, but it only takes one glance at the actual game to notice that it just seems sloppy.

On a more positive note, I enjoyed the treehouse level's aesthetics, although not so much Epicosaurus' blatant disregard for the fact that lava burns through wood.

So in the asylum level, I died. I had several lives left, but there was no torch in the level and I could not see a bleep thing. I gave up.

What is Lethal Mistakes? At times, it's mildly entertaining to play, but the guiding concept behind the game is poorly executed and it's far too easy to lose due to a careless mistake (and not on your part). The ludicrousness of the plot isn't entirely the creator's fault -- next time, choose something that Sploder is better suited for. Like zombies. That sounds original. c:

An expression: Don't quit your day job.