Some games I played in 2024: Spud!
The games I played in 2023 review is done with the addition of Lois & Clark and Combo Rangers. Hopefully I can freakin’ write some different things for a change! In the meantime… uh, more dumb game reviews, sorry.
Have you ever played a game, read a book or watched a TV show forever ago, left it unfinished, and wondered how it panned out in the end? And if you do decide to finish it long after the fact, is there any hope of it matching your expectations…?
Spud! is a game my brother and I were bought in the early days of PC gaming, a point-and-click adventure where you’ve got to rescue Santa Claus from the evil Dr. Chillbane with the help of toy gnomes and fluffy bunnies. Its first-person perspective for its point-and-click puzzles is really unique, offering 360 degrees of panoramic view at every waypoint, though perhaps to the point of excess — does even your inventory need to be a sprawling dome of shelves…?
It’s decidedly off-kilter, between its questionable depictions of Santa’s reindeer and the kooky characters you meet on a tropical island, not to mention its penchant for bloody violence — if you don’t send out the gnomes or bunnies as human shields (or the species equivalent), Spud is liable to come a cropper via a spear through the eye!
Back in the day we only got as far as the cave where you swap the trumpet for the bag of sand, triggering the Indiana Jones boulder escape sequence. You’d run your way back to the entrance, yet every time, no matter what, we’d get flattened. Was there something we were missing? An extra puzzle or trap we were overlooking? You could tell someone was taking another stab at it when you heard the game over jingle from the computer room, which became shorthand among us for sarcastically saying, “who could’ve seen that coming?”
It turns out we weren’t doing anything wrong — you literally just run back out the way you came. Either we completely overlooked the cave entrance, or our computer was so slow the boulder would flatten us by the time screen transitions were done loading!
In any case, I played the game on Discord (fighting with DOSbox the whole way to display the animations at the right speed) and managed to finally see the end of the island, discovered areas I’d never reached before… and then couldn’t get the second disc to run. The game is on Steam, presumably preset with functionality to alleviate those quirks…
… but I chose to just watch a longplay instead. I almost assuredly missed out on the interactive experience of figuring things out, but just getting the game to run was trouble enough. My patience had been spent!
(image from gamescitystore)
So, getting back to my original point: we couldn’t get past that stupid boulder, but darn if the box didn’t promise weird and wonderful things in the game’s future. We bought the game because of those penguins (dad pointed it by saying “penguin alert,” a name I would pay money to belong to a real product), and screenshots show Spud encountering a whole tribe of them, armed with spears and machine guns, led by one looking like a Caesar wannabe.
There’s weird green alien-lookin’ things, a seemingly imprisoned walrus, and perhaps most notably, a muscle-bound reindeer toting a gatling gun. It felt like the game had barely even begun by the time we got stuck, and it looked like there was plenty of new worlds to discover: “over 200 detailed locations” is one of the bullet-points, after all!
Well, you sail to the penguin kingdom and are promptly captured, but are let go once you rescue the king’s son (an egg with sunglasses) from a cave of so-called pixies. Then you faff about in Chillbane’s castle for a bit before fighting him with Santa’s toys, after which he falls out a window and dies I guess.
Again, watching a no-fuss longplay (that doesn’t even include death scenes, which is half the appeal of these games!) is a very different experience than playing it myself, but, uh, what I saw came across as a wee bit charmless. Screens upon screens of winter wasteland, featureless caves or nondescript castle, not really capturing my imagination the way Santa’s house or the tropical island did as a youngster.
We are not young anymore, so it’s no surprise watching one man’s parade of bad impressions over crudely rendered 3D models doesn’t captivate my imagination the way it once did, but the game really peaks in those first twenty minutes, huh…?
It looks like a kids game, and having to rescue Santa Claus with the help of toy elves definitely gives that impression, but it’s quick to try and subvert that image, between its foul-mouthed gnomes, catching Donna in the shower, and the basement full of massacred gnomes — the walkthrough I read claimed it was the work of Chillbane, but without that context, I could easily have assumed it was painting Santa as a brutal overlord punishing his workforce…!
The back of the box claims “it only looks like a kids’ game…”, but it’s hard to say it’s terribly adult either; it’s about the level of humour you’d expect from your average adolescent, what with its stoner rabbits and condom reindeer and whatnot.
The blurb even pulls a quote from PC Gamer claiming “SPUD stands head and shoulders above such games as Myst” — it’s a more immediately digestible world at first glance, with more characters to immediately interact with than just this empty island, but the game ain’t gonna win awards for its memorable cast or world-building or anything.
There’s some amusingly voiced characters along the way, and it excels when it’s just being stupid rather than subversive; Chillbane is a perfect cartoon villain, and it’s a pity he only bookends the adventure (minus his cackle during the game over screen). Watching a straight-forward playthrough does highlight that the deaths are where most of the charm is — seeing poor Spud get mowed down by machine gun fire or inflicted bonkus of the cronkus by a hulking pixie.
Skimming the game’s files to watch them is perhaps more satisfying than seeing them in-game — if that cave was any indication, the game has no checkpoints or midpoint saving during its ‘danger’ areas, you gotta redo them from the start if you bite it. Death is a setback, not simply a reward for fucking around and finding out…!
I think my ultimate takeaway is just wondering the hows and whys of its creation. PC gaming was still in a funny gulf at the time of high budgets for niche tastes, and this well and truly feels like someone handed development software to a couple of chucklefucks with a college dorm sense of humour. It’s panoramic perspective is impressive, and point-and-click adventures were no stranger to quirky atmosphere, from King’s Quest to Monkey Island…
… but it doesn’t really have fun writing or world-building to back it up the way those do, it’s just kind of silly and puerile. It gives the impression that sheer novelty is what earned it its funding — explore Toy Story-quality 3D environment to the greatest extent Windows 95 can offer, while also taking the piss if you were expecting something sincere!
Nostalgia’s a powerful thing, and there’s a lot of old PC games I’d consider duff and forgettable heralded as classics by some audiences, so fair play, I guess? I think revisiting Spud just shows the moment it’s outside the jurisdiction of childhood whimsy, I’m struggling to engage with what it’s offering.
I wish I could recall what I imagined the rest of the game to be like. I’m sure my ideas would’ve been childish and far beyond what the game was technically capable of presenting, but it’s disappointing seeing the real deal spent all its whimsy budget on the first two areas. Ah well.
