Turkey Chaser!

Turkey Chaser is a short game about .. well, catching Turkey!


Why, hello!

You are summoned to combat the tragedy facing earth - a turkey shortage for thanksgiving! That cannot do, so you willingly agree to catch all turkey that are necessary via portals.
But alas, an evil empire is the root of all this trouble and threatens to destroy you should you take too long. You eventually need to infiltrate their castle to get the turkey you need.

Which means you work under a timelimit of about 14 seconds which you can reset by moving to a new area or in later areas at certain points/buttons. It gets more difficult the further you progress. And while it isn't all that difficult you are constantly on edge because you will hit home at 1 second more often than you'd like to count, barely avoiding an explosive disaster.

You need to catch a certain number of turkeys in the area for the next portal to appear. Later on multiple portals inbetween will appear and at the very late game flames will travel the areas and need to be avoided. But more on those hot features later.

Every few stages you will be able to save, relax and talk to some guy.


Now, you trying to argue with the almighty!

You'll get a little bit of lighthearted and gradually intensifying dialogue, pet some animals and behold the moving save crystal. Your main character is actually an animal as well, but we are left in the dark as to which kind.



There are a couple of typos, text messages reaching outside the edges of the boxes and other flaws, but nothing too distracting.
The music and general mapping is RTP - it starts out cheesy, but gets more intense as we progress. The turkeys are custom-made, beautiful, slow, dumb creatures and our hero has a little tail.

There really isn't much to see, though, aside from this one room and the many stages you rush through.

The difficulty progression is fairly decent, although the very last map is frustratingly difficult. You got a very tight time limit and need to go through a couple of narrow hallways filled with flames. (it doesn't help that you need to repeat the easy but overly long stage before that).
The problem here is that these narrow hallways are filled with turkey - you need to catch only about half of the ones that are running about.
But the randomly moving turkey can block flames, making them go back earlier - in a 3 tile wide hallway a turkey moving forward, blocking the flame means you die instantly should you be trying to move past it. If it already is there, you can only catch it while standing and wait around which will, given that you need to move past 6+ rows of flames to get to the next timeresetting button, chip away at the time you don't have. And if that wasn't enough, there's also a glitch where you'll instantly die when you remove/catch a turkey next to a flame. (you could be trying to move, but it happened to often to be just a fault on my part, or so I'd like to think)
I spent probably 2/3 of playtime doing this level .. for all the wrong reasons. I did get better eventually, but this "difficulty" spike was rather frustrating.

Other than that, only one or two repetitions were needed and it all came very good together. You are rushing forward, and it does get very intense. The difficulty is alright and progressing, although those "time-buttons" aren't really making it harder. It just means that you run back and forth more often to save any second you can for the next rush. It really is more about traversing the stages as fast as you can rather than focusing on catching the turkey. They are just picked up along the way.

Either way, it was surprisingly engaging, straightforward fun. It has some amusing dialogue to go with it and does what it sets out to do pretty nicely for the majority of the game.