Brain Guzzlers from Beyond!

by Steph Cherrywell profile

Humor
2015

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Number of Ratings: 71
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- k42write, October 28, 2023

- Drew Cook (Acadiana, USA), September 7, 2023

- gattociao, August 19, 2023

- Edo, August 17, 2023

- Kastel, June 20, 2023

- elysee, May 4, 2023

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Uses its set piece well, January 1, 2023
by Lance Cirone (Backwater, Vermont)

One horrific night in the 1950s, teenager Bonnie Noodleman finds her almost-boyfriend attacked by horrific brain-guzzling monsters from beyond! However will she and her friends stop them? Such begins Brain Guzzlers from Beyond!

This isn't a hard game, but it's of a nice length. The puzzles are pretty basic, but some have multiple solutions, and areas you don't need to go to anymore tend to be closed off. The game is a parody of 1950s sci-fi, in a way that reminded me of Max Blaster, featuring comics with absurdly preachy messages and an absolute lack of severe language (such as "Oh my gosh!" and "We’re in such a deep pickle right now!"). These jokes are where the game is at its best, and I particularly loved your conversation with the robotic Wife of Tomorrow. The sci-fi aspect is handled well and plays a good part in the story. The latter half was full of great jokes with all the psuedo-futuristic technology; it felt like I was playing through an episode of Futurama.

There's a cast of characters in this game, all of whom get unique portrait art, which I didn't expect. The conversations are interesting and full of different options, and a lot of characters will stick around and even get a bit of surprising development. My favorite in this regard was Mary Jane, the hysterical prom queen who (Spoiler - click to show)turns out to be a brilliant inventor. Following these characters throughout the games, learning their likes and dislikes and getting their help to solve puzzles, was definitely one of its strengths.

Overall, the game's appealing writing style, approachable puzzles, and fun characters make it an easy recommendation. Definitely play The Mary Jane of Tomorrow after you beat it, too; that one's great.

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- Itsame64 (Mcloud, Oklahoma), December 5, 2022

- fartbox, August 8, 2022

- William Chet (Michigan), July 3, 2022

- penguincascadia (Puget Sound), March 28, 2022

- nosferatu, July 4, 2021

- bjbest60, April 29, 2021

- TheBoxThinker, January 25, 2021

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Good Golly Miss Molly!, September 27, 2020
by Rovarsson (Belgium)
Related reviews: SF, Comedy

A good story-driven game with easy puzzles and a menu-based conversation system, so nothing gets in the way of defeating the Brainguzzlers and saving your 1950s American Smalltown.

I really liked the game for the first half hour of play. After that the caricature of 1950s scifi horror, and of 1950s American society began to wear me down. I began half expecting The Jetsons coming down in a UFO of their own to drop off the Fonz who would then save the day.
I also doubt that "Jeepers!" would last long as the swearword of choice during an alien attack.

Technically, the game is very well put together. The scripted conversations are perfect for an uptempo story like this. Intro, middle and endgame are well paced. I would have liked some more implementation of scenery, but that would have slowed the game down, so it's understandable. What did bug me, and slowed the game down is the lack of synonyms available. A fast-paced story-game like this would have benefited from a wide choice of different names for your items so you didn't have to stop to remember how something was called in the description. I hated that in a scifi setting such as this, "blaster" was not recognized.

Probably best played in one go, straight through to the (slimy) ending.

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- peachesncream, August 9, 2020

- kierlani, June 8, 2020

- Zape, March 24, 2020

- samtam90, December 30, 2019

- ImaginaryTalkingRabbit, October 2, 2019

- erzulie, September 24, 2019

- Stian, June 22, 2019

- Elternabend, February 1, 2019

- JoQsh, January 28, 2019

- mirandamiranda, October 2, 2018

- Joey Jones (UK), September 15, 2018

- jusw85, March 27, 2018

- Guenni (At home), January 17, 2018

- Wanderlust, August 3, 2017

- kala (Finland), July 9, 2017

- Laney Berry, May 18, 2017

- DocDoe, May 15, 2017

- ifMUD_Olly (Montana, USA), April 21, 2017

- TheAncientOne, March 25, 2017

- Spike, March 18, 2017

- Christopher Hall (London, Great Britain), March 8, 2017

- ArchDelacy, January 14, 2017

- prevtenet (Texas), January 10, 2017

- Domaknitrix (Virginia), September 1, 2016

- stadtgorilla (Munich, Germany), August 18, 2016

- Lotus Watcher, August 14, 2016

- EJ, August 12, 2016

- Witchy W, August 4, 2016

- leanbh, June 26, 2016

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Fun, lighthearted (and subversive!) sci-fi piece, June 13, 2016
by streever (America)

This story is a puzzle-light spoof of 1950's (and modern!) stereotypes and tropes.

None of the puzzles are particularly difficult, and primarily consist of 'find the right object' type quests, with simple but fun secondary mechanics. There are any number of red herring objects (based on one play: it's possible they have more utility or alternate puzzle solutions) that add a sense of depth and contribute to the comedic themes.

The dialogue is fun and peppered with classic 'old-timey' declarations--when you are offered the chance, try saying the 'worst' swear your character can imagine.

The writing is concise, terse, and flows nicely: this is a piece that has clearly been edited & written for readability, and the effort is greatly appreciated.

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- sipral, May 11, 2016

- Doug Orleans (Somerville, MA, USA), May 6, 2016

- MattC, April 25, 2016

- Denk, April 6, 2016

- gatebuildr, April 3, 2016

- Caleb Wilson (Illinois), April 1, 2016

- Robin Johnson (Edinburgh, Scotland), March 9, 2016

- E. W. B., February 23, 2016

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A tight, well-written spoof of 50's sci-fi with comic-style graphics, February 3, 2016

This game was my predicted winner of IFComp 2015. This game is well-written, has great pacing (especially in the first half), a strong narrative voice, and excellent graphics. It is easy enough for people to get into with little IF experience, but provides enough of a challenge later on to be interesting.

You play a teenage girl whose town is overrun by the eponymous Brain Guzzlers. You have a cast of creatively-described friends and acquaintances who help you out. Conversation is menu-based, which allows Cherrywell to express the real flavor of the PC's world (with a lot of 'Jeepers!').

The game has some very creative puzzles, and some more straightforward. Each character of the game (besides yourself) comes with one or more high-quality graphics that show up when talking to them.

Game play is 2-3 hours long, I estimate. I recommend this to everyone; I feel like it will be played for years to come.

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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Brain-Guzzlin' Fun!, January 21, 2016

I've kept up with Cherrywell's comics since Muertitos, and as a longtime IF fan, was very thrilled to see them branch into the medium. Works very well for their signature quirky humor! Lots of cute jokes, but the fruit puzzle had me banging my head. Also, never knew (Spoiler - click to show)drive-in screens were made of silver...

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- hoopla, January 9, 2016

- jessicaperssica (Sweden), December 17, 2015

- Aryore, December 12, 2015

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Consistent fun, beginner friendly, December 5, 2015

I'm new to IF, but I still had a good time with this game.

In terms of the gameplay, I was never frustrated, but I still found the puzzles to be enjoyable.

I wasn't a big fan of the old (50s? 60s?) setting, but I appreciated the opportunities for humor that it afforded. It made me chuckle quite a few times.

I particularly liked the conversation system. I've been constantly frustrated by conversations in other IF, and having a multiple choice system like this works well, IMO. I've heard a common criticism of this type of interaction is that it feels too much "on rails" and doesn't feel immersive because you're not able to do whatever you want with regards to interacting with a character. I don't really agree with that criticism - in practice, you ARE limited to what you can do with a character even when it's not a multiple choice dialog system. Sure, you can type whatever you want, but a large class of actions are going to receive an identical or very similar non-response, so, effectively, you get the same experience. Even for choices that may seem like valid things to say to a character, the author might simply not have had time to implement responses or the parser might not be good enough to anticipate them. I like the compromise the multiple choice system achieves. Instead of spending time figuring out how I'm supposed to say what I want to say, I can just see my options right away.

The choice-based dialogue may not work so well, though, for a more first-person type of game where you're supposed to get more of a sense of "being your character", and it also has issues with regards to hiding information from players and having the dialog choices change when certain events occur, since, as the player, you don't always know when an event is going to let you say new things to a character. But I still liked it for this game.

I also really liked the inclusion of character portraits when you start a conversation. Just a few images to characterize the characters and give you a bit of an easier time imagining what the author intended adds a lot to the game, in my opinion. I thought the style of these portraits really went well with the style of the game, too.

So, overall, I definitely recommend it if you're new to IF. It's quite short, but it's solid and lacks some stuff that can make other IF frustrating to new players.

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- Carty, December 4, 2015

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Spine-Tingling Text-O-Rama, November 24, 2015
by CMG (NYC)

Brain-guzzling aliens have arrived from outer space to torment a New Mexican town. The citizens are oblivious, and it's up to you to convince them they're in danger before they've all been brain-guzzled. You play as Bonnie Noodleman, a Well-Adjusted Teen-Ager, and your yearbook profile lists your accomplishments as:

Winner, Miss Human Compass Junior Orienteer, 1956
Winner, Pine Nut Days Girls’ Grocery-Balancing Competition, 1958


I think this succinctly encapsulates the game's intent. It's a traditional text adventure that is self-aware about its tropes, and it's going to exploit them to have fun. And that's exactly what it does.

Structurally, the game is divided into a prologue followed by two main parts. The prologue is pretty much perfect. A character customization system built into an in-game magazine questionnaire, which then segues seamlessly into the action and establishes the setting, tone, and Bonnie's motivation all at once. It's great.

After the prologue, both of the game's two main halves are centered around object fetch-quests. You solve puzzles to collect items to deliver to an NPC in order to progress the story. When the first half concludes, you're treated to a satisfying action set-piece that feels like it will fundamentally alter the game. But then the dust settles, and not too much has changed, and you have to solve another puzzle sequence very similar to the one you just finished.

The second set of puzzles is actually better than the first, and the first set was already good. But the structure saps tension from the story right when things are starting to get dicey. I wanted the stakes to keep rising.

Of course the stakes were never going to be really high, because the game is a parody of B-movie horror. But parodies can have their own high stakes. And actually, the game is more a satire of American society "back in the day" than it is of horror films. It takes place on the cusp between the 50s and 60s. You've got Scooby-Doo hijinks, "ultramodern furniture" in "avocado, orange, and mustard-yellow," and the town fair has a Tomorrow Pavilion whose displays (including a robotic wife) are "glittering with the promise of tomorrow."

This reminded me a lot of The Venture Bros., which has a similar nostalgia for the era, even though it recognizes and criticizes the era's bigotry, repression, and naiveté. Brain Guzzlers is also critical, but it's never as scathing as Venture Bros. It's more interested in using the time period as a playful backdrop.

In the end, this is a very solid text adventure that will appeal to both sci-fi and horror fans, and it's got nice character illustrations too!

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- E.K., November 19, 2015

- Brendan Patrick Hennessy (Toronto, Ontario), November 17, 2015

- Cat Manning, November 17, 2015

- SallyChamp, November 12, 2015

- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 9, 2015

- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), October 31, 2015

- Pegbiter (Malmö, Sweden), October 28, 2015

- Sobol (Russia), October 26, 2015

- rwallace, October 26, 2015

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Well written, funny, parser-based interactive fiction., October 4, 2015
by besmaller (Portland, OR)

If you enjoyed Hunger Daemon or Chlorophyll, waste no time -you need to play this one.

Funny, great setting and characters, but most importantly a fully formed game, reacting well to player interaction with the environment. Fun, challenging, and sensible puzzles.

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