Eat a Cactus

Introduction

Eat a Cactus is one of those games that I just dread to review. It's not because the idea of comedy game is inherently bad in my opinion, but that the nature of comedy is so subjective as to make reviewing the work in an objective manner near impossible to pull off.

Story

The story of Eat a Cactus is pretty simple. Your a young indie developer whose returned to your small hometown of RMN only to find out that it's been taken over by the diabolic Cactus Lord. A man so evil that he makes people eat entire cacti in a single bite. Of course, I'm not sure how he manages to give people the sort of jaw that would make that possible, but maybe all of the members of RMN are also related to Chardin Family from Ranma 1/2 who are trained in Martial Arts Dining at the La Belle France School of Martial Arts. Regardless, in order to stop the nefarious Cactus Lord you'll need to track down a pair of items as well as find a friend willing to join you in your quest to give the Sinister Cactus Lord the beatdown of a lifetime.

Gameplay

Honestly, there isn't all that much to discuss in this section. After all, the bulk of game is a trio of simple fetch quests that can be completed in a couple of minutes. As such, their isn't all that much to discuss. Obviously, these fetch quests are meant to imbue the game with a few funny dialogue exchanges, but I find most of those exchanges rather lackluster in terms of comedic content. Though, a few of those exchanges did present me with an opportunity to shoehorn in references to other works when I did my Let's Play for the game.

Outside of the fetch quests the game also features a few battles, but all of those battles are super easy, but no so easy as to make the bosses laughably pathetic. In fact, I think the game should up Muffle's offensive power while lowering the defenses of the enemies to as close to zero as possible. That way the player can hit for such massive amounts of damage that it's absurd. Sort of like how in Disgaea you can hit enemies in excess of a 100,000 points of damage.

Graphics & Sound

On the graphical and sound front the game appears to largely rely on the RTP. As such, the game doesn't really have its own unique look or feel, but it'd be a bit ridiculous to expect a game that can be completed in under 10 minutes to include a lot of custom assets in my opinion. So, I'm willing to largely overlook this aspect of the game when assigning it a final score.

Glitches

On the other hand, I'm a lot less willing to ignore the fact that this game is a glitchy mess in a lot of places. In fact, during my playthrough I was able to skip over several parts of the fetch quests by talking to kory_toombs multiple times. I also managed to turn my party invisible at one point. Which made completing the game a bit of a pain in the &(^. Thankfully, I'm used to navigating in the dark thanks to all of the times I've traveled through Mt. Silver without the aid of flash in Pokemon Gold, Silver, & Crystal. So this didn't prevent me from finishing the game or require me to start over.

Conclusion

Eat a Cactus is a short, glitchy comedy game whose attempts to induce laughter can be rather hit or miss. In general I found the game rather lackluster in terms of comedic value on its own and derived most of my pleasure from playing it by shoving in references to Harry Potter, Little Monsters, and other works. As such, I really can't recommend this game based on my own experiences with it, but at the same time I don't want to push people away from playing it either. After all, the comedy on display in this game may appeal to others as seen by Frogge.