An Exercise in Futility

"An Exercise in Futility" is a difficult game to review for a few reasons in my opinion. For one thing this game is extremely short with the player being able to explore all of the game's content in under ten minutes, but if were going by ability to reach an ending then your average playtime in this game would be under two minutes. To make matters worse this game is a comedy game which makes rating it even more subjective since some people might find the player being forced to dance until they keel over by a bunch of faeries utterly hilarious while others will probably be left going, "what the $%#@! was that!". This is because the game's main method of making the player laugh is subjecting them to things that feel utterly random. For example you might decide to read a book on your shelf to get some dating tips only for your character to rapidly age like Walter Donovan in "Raiders of the Lost Ark".

Some will find the utter randomness of this death potentially funny. Others will simply blink in confusion since there really isn't anything to indicate that most of the objects in the protagonist's house are cursed. And you'd think most of that stuff would be locked up in a secure vault instead of just casually laying about the place.

To make matters worse you need to interact with some of these cursed objects in order to properly prepare for your date or she'll dump you which results in your character committing suicide. So your forced to interact with the various cursed objects in the house in order to successfully prepare for your date and survive. So your basically guaranteed to die a few times if your going into this game blind.

As it stands I'd suggest giving this game a pass since its attempts at comedy really aren't that great in my opinion. Which I mostly blame on the lack of death animations since dying in "El Dorado" is funny the first couple of times because we get to see how the character gets brutally mangled for making bad decisions while deaths in this game are only described, but if being told your girlfriend took you out with a shotgun for not properly preparing for taking her out is enough to make you laugh then you might get some enjoyment out of "An Exercise in Futility". Other wise I'd suggest giving this one a pass in favor of "El Dorado". At least if you want to laugh at your character dying in horrible ways.