I Expect You To Die

I expect you to die is a James Bond (with a little bit of that 'other' JB, Jason Bourne thrown in) parody game created for a three hour competition back in 2009. The idea was to create an entire game in three hours after having the theme revealed to the competitors; in this case that was 'A (playable) super villains in a pinch an Anti-hero would also be acceptable'. So in this theme-worthy addition to the category of 'hot mess that we hope doesn't crash' Kentona has given us the villainous Blofeld Lord Evilschtein and his plan for world domination through the use of elaborate and frankly ridiculously complex plot twists and the trope worthy Doomsday Device. All that stands against him is the ludicrously resilient and seemly immortal Mr Bournd, chief agent of the nation of Super France. As if the lackey of a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys could stand against the overwhelming intricacy of Lord Evilschtien's fiendish schemes!

However against all expectation Mr Bournd has managed to infiltrate the super secret Volcano Base and is attempting to sabotage the Doomsday Device before it can make an earth-shattering Kaboom over the nation of Super France and release its horde of alien locusts/zombifying mutant gas/ murderous nanobots/ enhanced-radiation warhead payload. So as his minions have once again proven to be spectacularly useless Lord Evilschtien sets out to rid himself of this annoying insect once and for all.

From that moment on it is a race to get to the Doomsday Device before Bournd does and see that it is deployed successfully. The problem is of course that all those devious and deadly traps and puzzles that stand between the agent and the device also stand between Evilschtien and it.


He really should have built a secret tunnel.

There are five mini-games that make up the various traps and puzzles that stand in the way of Lord Evilschtien's plans, of them two work fairly well and present a reasonable challenge, a further two are just a case of timing and using the environment to your advantage and the last one is pretty much a cakewalk since the way it is designed places all the obstacles and dangers behind you. For those levels that did present a challenge any mistakes are dealt with severely, as is to be expected in a super villains lair, though rather than having an intimate encounter with a laser cutter you get a time penalty to your countdown clock. If it reaches zero before you've cleared the level Mr Bourne will leap out and apprehend you and foil your fiendish plans and Super France will be saved, but we can't be having that.


Call my Doomsday Device a MacGuffin, huh?

In the end, I expect you to die is a fairly fun game, it's not going to win any awards, though as highlighted on the game page if the competition in which it was entered did have a winner, this one would be it. Still it was amusing and completely irreverent which is always welcome. I believe if the game had had a longer that three hour time frame the Kentona would have had time to tweak the dangers in all the levels to make them more of a challenge but actually having some of them fail in such a manner is both in keeping with the short contest expectations and the Supervillain mythos.

If you have a spare 10 minutes up your sleeve and feel like engaging in an over-abundance of maniacal laughter and snide villain trash talk this is the game for you.

I really would have liked to see Mr Bournd end up tied to a cutting table underneath an industrial laser, though.