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About the Story"Tooth beavers, hermits, phallic-shaped dust tomatos. Billed a living memorial to the wit, style, and unintentional genius of Rybread Celsius by Cody Sandifer." [--blurb from The Z-Files Catalogue]Game Details
Language: English (en)
Current Version: Release 1 License: Freeware Development System: Inform 6 Forgiveness Rating: Cruel Baf's Guide ID: 480 IFID: ZCODE-1-980928-E185 TUID: 86d7aest1ywd0eem |
Awards
23rd Place - 4th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (1998)
Editorial Reviews
Baf's Guide
-- Duncan Stevens
SPAG
[...] Whatever the truth behind the smokescreen, opinion is clearly divided on the Celsius oeuvre. He appears to have an enthusiastic cult following who look at his works and see the stamp of genius, paralleled by another group who look at those selfsame works and see only barely coherent English and buggy code. I have always counted myself among the latter. [...] (Paul O'Brian)
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>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page
As usual, my regular categories don't apply. Plot, puzzles, writing -- forget about it. Acid Whiplash has no real interaction or story in any meaningful sense. (There is, however, one very funny scene where we learn that Rybread is in fact the evil twin of a well-known IF author). If you're looking for a plot, or even something vaguely coherent, you ought to know that you're looking in the wrong place.
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Member Reviews
| Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review |
The writing is at its best lampooning literary criticism, doing unique or otherwise unvisualizeable things with language (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)“Room in the Shape of a Burning Credit Card”), or toying with notions of interactivity (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)playing with audience assumptions in the first interview scene). Those elements make Acid Whiplash recommendable. It could’ve done those things more frequently, though. Irritable players: use a walkthrough (I did).
Its non-sequitur humor gets stale quickly. Why did it have to include any mazes? I sort of wish the game just had a word you could type in to skip from one interview scene to the next.
A surreal interview with Rybread Celsius, infamous IF author, May 3, 2016This game is more polished in programming, but with the same style of writing and gameplay. You go through a series of disconnected scenes, which include numerous pieces of a hilarious interview with Celsius.
The game contains some profanity, some lewdness. If you like absurd games or learning more about the IF community, you may enjoy this game. It references all of his previous games, Graham Nelson and his games, Unnkulia, Spider and Web, and many more.
Edit: Since I wrote this article, Johanna De Niro has written a very interesting article on Rybread Celsius that has made me appreciate their work much more. It is available at Sub-Q magazine.
Randomness is not creativity, December 30, 2007This is the first Rybread game I've played; it seems to be the kind of thing that usually gets described as "unique" and "like being on drugs". But it isn't unique, really; it's just the same old kind of thing that tends to result from the misconception that random absurdity is the same thing as creativity.
It did start quite promisingly:
Womb with a view
This is a room. You feel very comfortable here. Its got lots of space. But you feel a need for something more, something to fulfill your life. You can go north.
>n
No you can't, I lied. Try west.
Now I thought that was funny — and there were a few other genuinely amusing moments in the game too, but a lot of it was just tedious. I found the "interview excerpts" particularly tedious; page-long infodumps with the tired premise of taking absurd things seriously.
(I do realise that this game is nearly a decade old as I write this, but I'm sure this kind of thing was pretty old even then.)
If you want to see "weird" done well, I'd recommend you try Deadline Enchanter instead.
If you enjoyed Acid Whiplash...
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Recommended Lists
Acid Whiplash appears in the following Recommended Lists:Camp/"So Bad It's Good" by Ivanr
It might seem strange that a video game, which relies on consistent and effortful coding in order to deliver any kind of experience, could be "so bad it's good" in the way that an Ed Wood movie is. But it can happen, as this list...
Favorites by Ivanr
This is a chronologically-ordered list of the games that are my personal favorites. These are the games that have stuck with me the way that a great movie or a great book does; a more restrictive criterion yet than my choice to give...
Games about interactive fiction itself by MathBrush
This is hopefully my last list. These are games that comment on the nature of interactive fiction or the interactive fiction community itself. The quality of these games varies wildly, and this list doesn't attempt to sort by quality....
Polls
The following polls include votes for Acid Whiplash:I'm looking for a great surreal game. by Bishopofbasic
It's pretty hot up here in Canada and I was wondering if anyone knew of any great surreal type games. Something I can spend my time in front of the AC or in my office hiding from the world. Thanks you guys.
This Is Who We Are by Sam Kabo Ashwell
A considerable number of games exist largely as the commentary of the IF community (or some subset of it) upon the medium and the community itself. These works are likely to be befuddling to outsiders, but provide windows onto blah blah...
"Ed Wood" Games by murphy_slaw
I'm looking exquisitely bad games. Games with warped aesthetics and worldviews far removed from consensus reality. Games that are, in the words of Michael Martin, "exactly good enough that I had to keep going to see what it did next"....
This is version 4 of this page, edited by Paul O'Brian on 7 May 2008 at 1:02pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item