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Contains 05 Mammal/Mammal.z5
A .zip of all the games on the tribute album.
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)
I7 Source Code
Inform 7 Source Code. Feel free to make remixes, remakes etc. as you see fit.

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Mammal

by Joey Jones profile

Episode 5 of Apollo 18 Tribute Album
Humor
2012

Web Site

(based on 20 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

The lizards have taken over. You, a lowly human slave, are tasked with eradicating all mammalian traces from the Don Quixote Memorial Museum.

(Written for the Apollo 18+20 tribute album project.)


Game Details


News

Mammal, a treasure-hunt for our lizard overlords, has been released with a hand-drawn map that updates as the player explores the museum. This uses a new in-browser interface called Zorkmid.

Zorkmid (Z-Code Mapping and Illustrations Device) is a new community-driven project to provide games with human-designed maps and illustrations that display in an attractive new interface.
Reported by Joey Jones | History | Edit | Delete
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A collect-themed-items game, like Dinner Bell, February 15, 2016

This game is similar to Dinner Bell, and appear in the same collection. You have to gather 14 kinds of mammal dna (like Dinner Bell, the list comes from a They Might Be Giants song).

You have to do this because your lizard-people overlords are forcing you to. So there is a genocidal aspect to the game.

I found this game to be somewhat difficult near the end because I didn't realize how many items had additional uses.

I used the Club Floyd transcript for the last two puzzles.

I found it enjoyable, but sometimes wonky (hidden items aren't listed in the room description even after you discover them, you can wind things you really oughtn't be able to wind, and so on).

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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Banality Of Evil Adventure, April 11, 2012

Mammal is a small-to-medium-sized treasure-hunt game with mild puzzles. As the human slave of reptilians, you are tasked with eradicating all traces of mammals from a museum.

(Spoiler - click to show)This is a fairly grim premise, since you're effectively a Sonderkommando. The wider context of the purge is never explicitly stated, but there's ample evidence that it has been a violent and chaotic process. The featureless protagonist shows no signs of emotional reaction, and dutifully goes about a set of simple tasks that are perfectly familiar to an IF player: find and identify the treasures, solve some mild puzzles to secure them, return them to the trophy-case. The PC is wholly subsumed by their role.

There are some obvious homages: the skip as trophy case is a throwback to Ad Verbum, and the reptilians bear no small resemblance to Dr. Sliss of Rogue of the Multiverse. (If there are any direct references to the TMBG song, I wouldn't notice them.) More generic stock IF devices are common, too: a crowbar to pry things with, a wandering cat. This is about the morally numbing effect of familiarity, of how having an excellent practical grasp of how to do something can make it seem less ethically troubling. That this is a mechanically unremarkable game is kind of the point. The puzzles are just fiddly enough to engage your attention and keep it away from the elephant in the room. Ultimately, you incinerate yourself for the lousy last point. (I assume; there's a point or two that I haven't found.)

Mammal is not an ethically deep work; it has a single trick to pull, a single point to make. But it's cleverly handled, and it delivers a mean little moment of realisation. And it's very clearly not about the rather tired point that players will cheerfully do atrocious things if shepherded by gameplay; rather, it takes that as read and takes advantage of it.

(There is one small bug: if you incinerate yourself while holding other mammals, the other mammals are not incinerated.)

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Mammal on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Mammal appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Apollo 18+20 by Teaspoon
Interactive fiction games, with one game per track on the album Apollo 18 by They Might Be Giants. The regular tracks are generally short games. The Fingertips tracks are one-move games (however the authors interpreted that). The games...

Polls

The following polls include votes for Mammal:

More than it appears to be... by dacharya64
I'm looking for games that aren't exactly what they seem. Perhaps they come across as simple or romantic or anything really, the point is that things take a turn for the worse (or perhaps the better) and everything begins to change....




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