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Not a Ren and Stimpy tribute, but plenty absurd, September 6, 2023I'd have played Yak Shaving sooner, but for whatever reason, I fixated on that Ren and Stimpy episode I remembered that wasn't one of my favorites. I did not need to read that in text form.
What I didn't realize was that yak shaving had become a general term for the distracting stuff you need to do just to get through life that gets in the way of the big stuff you want to do. And the author relied more on that, and it's more a satire of, well, all sorts of things. There's a yeti and a yak and a corrupt Dada Lama. With a description like "A more or less matching pair of yak's wool socks, size 90," it's pretty clear things aren't at any great risk of going basso-profundo.
YS has two versions, Adrift and Inform, and I preferred the Inform version, being bigger, though it clocked in only at eight rooms. The author had promised some new locations, but some entirely different ones popped up instead. This only adds to the surrealism, of course.
It starts as a tongue-in-cheek quest for enlightenment. An acolyte tells you you can't see the Dada Lama while carrying any possessions. You, in a way, pass the Lama's "knowledge" to the acolyte. Helping the yak helps you unfreeze a yeti. Some items have the sort of uses you'd expect in a silly game. The end is of the "I learned I learned nothing at all, and nobody can" variety. Though it was surprisingly uplifting. Along the way, of course, you bash some zen tropes that have been done to death, but they're rather fun to kick a bit further.
For some reason I built YS up to be more than it was, even though the author generally goes in for shorter stuff (Excalibur excepted.) So it was nice to get around to it. Ironically I may have done a lot of yak-shaving (to use a new term I was enlightened with) instead of playing YSKG, and what's more, I recognized YSKG as a sort of yak-shaving for my own goals of writing text adventures, which have become yak-shaving for writing actual literature. This made me feel dumb and small until I looked through the jokes again. Then I felt better.
