Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata?
What a title! I’m looking at the IFDB, and it seems like this is part of a series. I do remember seeing those other titles before now that I think about it, but this is the first in the series I’ve played.
Parser puzzler. I feel like I might’ve taken more than two hours. It’s a detective story set in a world where all the characters are… like, food items, or at least food related. You’re a gumball, and other characters include Candy Kane, Father Wafer, Officer Bagel. You’re trying to solve the death of Jimmy Pinata, and there’s a lot of fun noir parodying/homage here along with all the puns.
A lot of the game seems focused on–or at least spent–talking to people. This allows the game to really shine a spotlight on some of its strongest aspects, which are its characters and the world it’s built. The dialogue system is ASK person ABOUT topic; the amount of topics the characters respond to here is admirably large, and there’s bolded keywords in their responses that point to more things to ask about. Responses were quite short, one or two sentences, so it does feel like I spent quite some time just extracting every drop of conversation from each person. These people, most of whom were uh, let’s say criminal adjacent at best, were surprisingly forthcoming about chatting to you about, say, the local drug trade. It’s solid hard-boiled dialogue, and characters give you incomplete pictures of what’s happening, so the biggest puzzle of all seems to be piecing it all together. But short responses, lots of topics, lots of typing ASK blank ABOUT blank. When it come to dialogue systems I think I generally like using TALK TO or numbered menus more than ASK/TELL (less typing, generally leads to more natural dialogue) but that’s maybe more personal player preference.
But there are actual puzzles as well, which I just… wasn’t able to solve. After the intro, I looked around. The map isn’t that big, but there’s a lot of things to look at, lot of people and a lot of topics to talk to each of them about, and no specific sense of where to start or where to go next. Which is fine enough; I look around, and find about six locations where there’s either a locked door, or someone blocking my path to another room. One issue I ran into is there’s some non-obvious dependencies because some of those locked locations are solved using items behind another blocked path, but I was focusing on the wrong one to start with. Two puzzles were open to me from the start, but I thought I needed to look elsewhere for more info to solve both of them. Part of it might be all the talking I’d been doing; I perhaps got the wrong idea from all the dialogue options that this was more of a talking game, so I thought I’d talk to people and pick up leads, and then those leads would naturally guide me to what people to investigate next, and I’d also maybe find dirt on people so I could lean on them more.
Spoilery explanation
The bookstore was one of the places solvable to start. It’s a location which I don’t think anyone else mentioned, and Jawbreaker is guarding the back, some people have mentioned him. But I don’t know anything about the bookstore or why Jawbreaker’s there. I’m looking for a password, but I mistakenly figured I’d have to learn something about Jawbreaker, like his favorite song or something to figure that out, and I also figured I’d maybe learn why I wanted to get past Jawbreaker before I’d actually have to get back there. I mainly focus on the VIP lounge, since a lot of people are mentioning it, I know who’s in the lounge so I know why I want to get there, and I even see a lot of clues for what the solution there involves. It seemed like a lot of things pointing to it as the place to start. The church I also don’t look at too much yet, because I thought it just seemed like it’d be more of a talking puzzle where I eventually would’ve learnt something that I could guilt trip the Father with into confessing, and then he would’ve let me up the stairs. That’s not a good assumption on my end, but I just didn’t think about trespassing as an option yet. The boat makes it clear what type of puzzle it is so trespassing IS on the table there, and I poke at it a bit at the start. Eventually I also had to look at hints because I tried chewing but not licking the taffy, so I had the right idea but the wrong verb. I finished the chase sequence scene which was fun, but I was asked who I thought it was by that character you meet and I really didn’t have any clue yet (I suggested Big Hunk since he seemed to know some stuff he wasn’t sharing). But my conversation with that character post-chase made me think I should’ve had more idea about what was happening by that point, because they mention that killing Jimmy wouldn’t stop them from selling, which seems to presuppose I know a lot more about what’s going on than I actually did. This character, Big Hunk, and the character on the boat all seemed to know at least a bit about what happened to Jimmy, but none of them really told me a lot about him, and there’s no real way to press them any further.
I kept playing, and eventually I felt like I’d been going too long without any progress so I looked at the walkthrough. That got me into two places and gave me a bit more evidence, and I eventually started accusing people and I did get the ending, but without really having an understanding of the central mystery of what Jimmy Pinata was involved in until I just read through the walkthrough a bit more. Didn’t really know who the rucksack belonged to, and also found the balloons off with walkthrough help but don’t know how I would’ve known their significance. So the only clues I feel like I really picked up on myself was the smell on the tire iron and the nougat on the keypad, and the things people told me. And the hitman was obviously either tied to the bookstore or framed like they were.
Everything beyond of the puzzles certainly seemed to be quite good, and the puzzles do seem generally reasonable enough in retrospect, if you go in with a more of a cavalier attitude towards private property then I did. Which you should, it’s a parser game after all. The clues to the mystery do seem to come together in an interesting way as well once you know what you’re looking at; there’s a chance I just missed some clues or just wasn’t able to interpret the ones I had. The writing is fun, the setting and world is vivid and well put together, and there’s lots of neat characters to talk to.